My Travels: Duluth to Grand Marais, A Waterfall Day!

The coffee was hot and ready and 5 am, so I had my early coffee. We had a nice breakfast at the hotel once Jeanne was up. We didn't hang around long, we packed up and headed out. The idea was to drive along the coastline of Lake Superior and stop at view points or waterfall. We stopped at Agate Beach close to Black Beach.

This was a nice beach, but no agates, just a lot of rocks.

We saw rain off in the distance. We were hoping that it would miss us.

Next stop was Cascade Falls

It was a nice mostly well-maintained trail. Then we drove on to Grand Marais.

We did some dinking in the shops. Jeanne had a few things which she was looking for. We also went in a few art galleries.

Cool rocks in front of an art gallery.

Painted staircase

Fun painted building but the tail of the fish has broken off.

Then it was lunch time.

We went to the Blue Water Cafe.

Jeanne and I split a turkey berry melt - turkey, bacon, cheddar cheese, lingonberry sauce on cranberry wild rice bread. Jeanne gave me her bacon. It was quite tasty. But they gave way too many fries. We could not finish them.

Just as we left the restaurant it started to pour, so we headed back to the car and continued driving. We did not make any more stops until we got to the Grand Portage State Park, because of the rain.

We turned in right before the Canadian border.

The primary Ojibwe name associated with the region and the falls is Git-che-O-ni-ga-ming, which means "a great carrying place" and refers to the entire Grand Portage area. Gichi-gami refers to Lake Superior.

Very nice State Park facility.

There are a lot of things translated into Ojibwe. Jeanne said that they teach Ojibwe as one of the languages in the local college.

The point of this trip was to get to the tallest waterfall in Minnesota, at 120 feet, It is the High Falls on the Pigeon River which separated the USA and Canada. In fact my phone thought I was in Canada. I got a welcome to Canada notification. Jeanne did too. We were lucky that it had stopped raining. By the time we got there.

More stairs

Amazing falls.

We walked to another view point which gave a slightly different view.

We went down another trail where we could get to the Pigeon River.

There is Canada!!

It was a perfect day. Seeing the falls was well worth the drive.

We headed back towards Grand Marais again.

We were curious what monument was here.

Apparently this monument was more like a museum of the trading post and the Grand Portage trail that the Native Americans used first.

We walked down to the fort.

When we had been driving north I had seen a house that was wild with "junk". Jeanne hadn't seen it. So when we came to it again we had to stop so that I could take a few pictures.

The whole yard.

And their mailbox

I took a video of the whole place, but I can't load it on here.

We got back to Grand Marais and checked into the Aspen Lodge around 5 pm.

We headed back into Grand Marais to run a few essential errands - like buying some wine. We also went to the Benjamin Franklin store to pick up something Jeanne had seen earlier.