The Soo & The Macs

Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced Soo Saint Marie), Michigan is at the opposite end of Lake Superior from Duluth.  It’s located on the far northeastern corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Its twin city, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is located directly across the St. Marys River.

We arrived Thursday afternoon after driving from Marquette, Michigan.  En route, we drove through Christmas, MI, but there wasn’t much reason to slow down.

Also during the trip, we toured a remarkable little place called Owsald’s Bear Ranch, in the town of Newberry, MI.

Oswald’s currently has 40 bears that have been rescued from various life-threatening situations.  They are provided with various habitats, which are as big as a half-mile in perimeter.  Reportedly, PETA is not impressed and gives the place a hard time.  It’s hard to imagine the logic of this, but PETA is an organization that, when given the choice of stridency and common sense, seems to always choose stridency.

We saw newly-rescued cubs…

young bears and big-boy (and -girl) bears who, despite their habitats, know when to hang near the crowds and get apples…

and more than one big guy who just decided to climb a tree.

They are beautiful creatures.  

We got double-lucky in Sault Ste. Marie.  The weather was Duluth-like – sunny and warm.  Plus, our RV park was smack-dab on the St. Marys River, with a view of Canada…

and some biiiig ships.

“Sault” is French for shallow rapids.  The Saint Marys River links Lake Superior to Lake Huron. Unfortunately, there’s a difference of 20 feet between  the lakes, which produces rapids on the Saint Marys between the lakes.  Freighters do bad things in rapids, so to facilitate commercial traffic, locks were constructed, first by Canada (1894) and then by America (1896).  They’re now part of the 2,300 mile-long St. Lawrence Seaway between Lake Superior and the Atlantic Ocean.

On Friday, we toured the Soo Locks.  Our tour boat entered the Canadian lock along with a spiffy motorboat…

the gates closed…then it took 10 minutes to fill the lock with 1.5 million gallons of water to raise us 21 feet (the lighter color on the top of the sidewall at the left of the pic is the water-line to which we were raised), after which we could go to Lake Superior.  We then went past a steel mill, reportedly one of the ground zero points for the President of the United Base’s steel tariffs against Canada.  

We returned via the bigger American locks, which include one that’s six-fold longer than the Canadian lock we used and requires 22 million gallons of water to either fill or be dispersed.  As big as it is, some of the freighters are so big that they have only two-and-a-half feet of leeway on either side of the lock when they’re in it.  However, Congress cannot find the money to fund a new super-lock big enough to accommodate the latest and largest tankers (enjoy your tax cut, everybody).
Our boat started at ground level with a park on the American side…

and with a pressbox-like tourist viewing area…

but 10 minutes later, we had dropped those 21 feet, which changed our perspective on everything (that strip of darkness in the pic below is the top of that same viewing area shown in the previous pic…

before we headed back out onto the Saint Marys and to our Sault Ste. Marie dock.

Saturday morning, we headed south.  Fun fact – we left Sault Ste. Marie via the northern terminus of Interstate 75.  Last Monday, we left Duluth via the northern terminus of I-35.  During our trip so far, we’ve also driven on the western terminus of I-90 (Seattle), the western terminus of I-80 (Oakland), the western terminus of I-10 (Santa Monica), the southern terminus of I-5 (San Diego) and the western terminus of I-8 (San Diego).  This is turning into a thing for us.  Our itinerary also includes the eastern termini of I-90 (Boston), I-80 (New York), I-26 (Charleston) and I-10 (Jacksonville), the southern terminus of I-95 (Miami) and maybe the eastern terminus of I-40 (Wilmington, NC) and the southern termini of I-65 (Mobile) and I-59 (New Orleans).  This probably isn’t as interesting to most people as it is to me.

Our plan was to drive down I-75 Saturday and cross the five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge.  It straddles the strait between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan and links the Upper Peninsula to the rest of Michigan (although there’s a sneaky-snarky sign near the bridge, presumably put up by a Youpper, directing southbound traffic to the “Lower Peninsula”).

Thanks to a last-minute tip from Lisa Foster, however, we called an audible and stopped at the town just before the bridge, St. Ignace, MI, where we caught a ferry to Mackinac Island.

Mackinac Island is a cross among Martha’s Vineyard, Block Island (which is slightly less than half the size of Mackinac), Victoria, BC, Cape May and the Boardwalk at Epcot.

It’s full of charm, history and fudge.

The French stole the island from what I guess we should call the Indians or Natives (can’t call them Native Americans because this was during the 1670s).  The British took control of the entire Straits of Mackinac area after the French and Indian War ended 1763.  The U.S. got the place as part of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, then hung on to it by the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, even though we lost two battles to the British when trying to recapture the island after the Brits seized it during that war.

Mackinac Island was a center of the fur trade and commercial fishing in the mid-1800s, but since then the place has mostly been about tourism.  Based on the size of the many spectacular old houses on the island, it’s also been a long-time place for the beautiful people to build, spend and play.  

Our ferry first drove us out to the Mackinac Bridge.

Our tour guide offered no explanation – presumably because there isn’t one, geologically – for why Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have the characteristics of one body of water, but are considered to be separate.  Both of the lakes and the Straits of Mackinac between them (where the bridge is built) have the same elevation and freely exchange water.  If they were considered one lake, they/it would comprise the biggest fresh-water lake in the world, instead of Lake Superior.

Pulling into the harbor at Mackinac Island, we knew immediately we were in for something special.  The Grand Hotel is true to its name (it even charges you $10 to walk on the sidewalk outside the place).

There is also small-town charm.

But around every quiet corner, there were bunches of tourists.

There are no motor vehicles on the entire island.  As a result, there are more bicycles than at a Sierra Club convention plus an endless stream of horse-drawn carriages used both for both tourism and business.

So instead of traffic cops, Mackinac has clean-up crews.

The main export of the island now appears to be fudge.  I counted 10 fudge stores in a two-block area.  The aroma of baked sugar permeates the main part of town.  And it’s really good fudge, by the way.

And if all this wasn’t enough to make for a great day, Roxy loved her first boat ride.  Sting mostly basked.

We then drove uneventfully across the “Mighty Mac”  bridge…
to a little town outside of Traverse City, MI, where we’ll spend the next few days, catching up on a couple of activities we’ve gotten out of the habit of doing – golf and hiking!