I had my second shoot in two years up at the Lund Boat Factory in New York Mills. This year the family decided to tag along. So, we found a place to stay up in nearby Detroit Lakes. We stayed at a renovated motel right across from the beach.      We lucked out getting the first room that has window views to the lake. 

  We went big for my birthday cabin weekend this year. Scott even said, What is this your 40th birthday? Usually we just do one or two nights somewhere but this year we did 4 nights.  I figured we wouldn't be traveling quite as much this year, so we could splurge a bit for Brooke's birthday weekend. We started our first night at a  yurt in Cable, Wisconsin  to break up the drive.   It was a pretty hike in.  They insisted you'd need snowshoes or a fat bike, but really the trail was tamped down so much we could've used just boots. I had no idea we would be staying in the middle of miles of skiing and snowshoeing trails. You can snowshoe or ski right up to the yurt.   

We didn't find any copper so we moved onto our next destination.  Our tour guide said that there was still about half the deposit left. You'd have to be a daredevil-diving-mine spelunker to get anything out. Everything below the floor we were in is flooded. Scott was excited to check out the town of Calumet. We parked downtown and paid 5 cents to park for an hour. Deal of the Century! The entitre downtown is a national historic park. It was the copper capital of the world, but has seen better days. The fire station is connected to the Calumet Theatre . I wish we would've went inside. After a little while we walked on back to our car to head on north.  On the way out I saw this old man sitting on this stoop. He made me wonder what the difference between a beautiful, but derelict small town like Calumet and say Detroit. You couldn't imagine the NPS declaring Detroit a national park, could you? I had read about how th...

Once we decided to exit stage Mackinac, we had to decide what to do asap.

We had to wait an hour but we made it onto the next ferry. I couldn't keep my eyes off the Mackinac Bridge. One of the Star Line Ferries actually passes under it. Next time we go to Mackinac, probably with kids, we'll have to drive over it.

As soon as we made it up Bayfield's relatively steep hill we put the gear in the car and I put the bikes back on the rack.  I don't think our car is meant to have a bike rack like this. The hatchback window is bolted into steel, but you're actually tethering the bike rack to the glass. Every time I heard a creaking noise along the highway I was nerve-wracked.