Living Our Dream

Henry Ford Museum

Milford, MI - Events of Tuesday, August 30, 2011

After our weekend visits with family and friends and our Monday tour of the GM Assembly Plant in Flint, we drove back to Dearborn on Tuesday to see the Henry Ford Museum. The village and the museum are located adjacent to one another and are part of what is used to be called the Edison Institute. Today, it is called The Henry Ford.

Henry Ford began the institute to preserve items of historical significance and to portray the Industrial Revolution. The museum started out with Henry Ford's personal collection, which he began accumulating as far back as 1906.

The entrance to the museum is designed to look like Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

The museum is divided into several sections - railroads, automobiles, Heroes of the Sky (airplanes), Made in America (power and manufacturing), Your Place in Time (artifacts of American life and pop culture), agriculture, Fully Furnished (American furniture back to 1670), and Liberty and Justice for All (America's quest for freedom - independence to civil rights). On top of all that, there is also a temporary exhibit on the Civil War.

We decided to make our way through the museum from right to left, mostly because the nearest rest room was to the right. We passed the display of presidential limousines that include one belonging to President Reagan, one with a plastic bubble top that was used by Truman and Eisenhower, and even a horse-drawn brougham belonging to Theodore Roosevelt. The one we thought most interesting was the 1961 Lincoln that Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.

In the railroad section, there are numerous trains on display including the behemoth 2-6-6-6 Allegheny locomotive. At 600 tons, these were some of the largest steam locomotives ever built. They were designed to haul long coal trains over the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia. The locomotives were so powerful they could pull coal trains over a mile long at speeds up to 60 mph.

Visitors can also climb into the cab and try the controls.

The Ford Museum has an excellent collection of old cars and trucks; but, unfortunately, the automobile exhibit is closed for renovation until sometime in December. However, they have relocated some of the cars to an area on the far side of the trains, so we got to see at about a dozen of them. The car in the foreground is a 1905 Ford Model B.

From the temporary automobile area, we went to Heroes of the Sky. One of the planes on display is a replica of the Wright Flier.

Other planes range from 1909 to 1939. The Ford Motor Company had a division that built airplanes from 1925 to 1932. One of their best known planes is the Ford Trimotor. The one on display at the museum was used by Admiral Byrd in the first-ever flyover of the South Pole.

Ford got out of the airplane business in 1932 because they lost $5.5 million during the 7-year period they built planes, and they never turned a profit.

Heroes of the Sky also has test flight area where visitors can make and test-fly paper airplanes. There are instructions for folding...

...and an area for testing. Paul didn't hit the target, but he did have one flight that almost made it to the end.

The next area of the museum we came to was called Made in America. Here, there are exhibits of some of the machines from the late 1700s through the early 1900s that helped turn America into a manufacturing superpower. There were lots of generators, but one that caught Paul's eye was this water turbine-powered generator. The generator is to the left, and the water-powered turbine that drove it is behind.

To illustrate how much work it is to generate electrical power, they have a hand-cranked generator. The faster you turn the crank, the more lightbulbs light up. We both got up to 4 or 5 bulbs lit for short periods - only about 400 watts.

The exhibit also featured many steam engines including the one shown below that is 30-feet tall. It used to drive machinery that was used to make lead products such as pipe. The machine features decorative gothic design elements even though it was never intended to be displayed to the public.

An interesting piece of manufacturing equipment on display is a ribbon glass machine that was used by Corning Glass. This machine was introduced in the 1920s and revolutionized the manufacture of lightbulbs. It could take a ribbon of molten glass and blow it into moving molds to make 600 to 700 glass lightbulb casings a minute. There are 600 glass casings in the stack in the photo. 

At the edge of Made in America is a display showing all the parts of a Model T. It is really quite remarkable in its simplicity.

There was also a room where you could watch technicians working on restoration projects. It is a painstaking process.

The dominant feature in the Your Place in Time exhibit is the Dimaxion House. The name comes from dynamic maximum tension. An aluminum house was first designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1920s as strong, low-cost, mass-produced housing. Several prototypes were built in the 1940s, and this is the only one to survive. One of Fuller's investors used the house as an addition to an existing ranch house until 1970. The Dimaxion was donated to the museum in 1990 and underwent extensive restoration. It didn't go on display until 2001.

The next photo shows the living room-dining room.

The agriculture section had a lot of farm equipment similar to what we have seen in other museums. One unique item was the experimental tractor designed by Henry Ford around 1907. He called it his "automotive plow." One reason Henry Ford was so interested in things mechanical was his dislike for back-breaking farm work. He had a lifelong desire to make farmers' work easier. Therefore, it is no surprise he would eventually begin manufacturing tractors.

With Liberty and Justice for All has numerous exhibits of historical American artifacts. They have Lincoln's chair from Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot. Unfortunately, the lighting was very low to prevent fading of the chair's fabric, so we couldn't get a good photo.

They also have the camp box and folding cot used by George Washington. The mattress sure doesn't look like it would provide much comfort, but it was still probably better than sleeping on the rocky ground.

Liberty and Justice for All also has several displays on the Civil Rights Movement. The refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus in 1955 was one of the first acts of civil disobedience that was to become the hallmark of the movement. The Henry Ford Museum has the actual bus that Rosa Parks was riding that day back in Montgomery, Alabama.

We were a little earlier leaving the museum than we were leaving Greenfield Village the week before. That helped us avoid heavier traffic on the way back to the motor home. We had the rest of that day and the following day to relax and do our usual pre-departure chores before heading to our next destination. We'll have more info in our next post.

More Greenfield Village

Milford, MI - Events of Friday, August 26, 2011

As we explained in our last post, Greengield Village is divided into several areas with different themes. After seeing the Working Farms and the Railroad Junction areas of Greenfield Village, we headed to Main Street where shops and businesses of yesteryear are located.

Some of the buildings in Greenfield Village are of great historical significance, and some are fairly ordinary and are being preserved simply because they help illustrate a past way of life. The Cohen Millinery Shop, which was built in Detroit around 1880, is an example of the latter. Sara Cohen, a young widow, started the business to support herself and her children after her husband died. She made new hats and redecorated old ones to keep women of the neighborhood in the latest styles. Hat making was also a popular hobby back in the 1950s, and both our mothers made hats. That's what sparked our interest in the millinery shop. Of course, Margery HAD to try on some of the fashions. 

Next to the millinery is the Heinz House. The house was built in 1884 in Sharpsburg, PA in our old hometown of Pittsburgh. Henry J. Heinz worked in the basement of the home making and bottling horseradish. Horseradish, not ketchup, was the first product of the H. J. Heinz Co.

The Wright Cycle shop, which has great historical significance, was relocated from Dayton, OH and sits right across the street from the Heinz House. The Wright Brothers used money they earned selling and repairing bicycles in the front of the shop to finance the experimental flying machines they built in the workshop in the back.

As a young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln tried cases in the Logan County Courthouse between 1840 and 1847. The courthouse was originally located in what is now Lincoln, IL.

The J. R. Jones General Store was built in 1857 in Waterford, MI. It represents countless general stores in small-town America that sold everything from clothing to hardware to groceries.

The next area we visited was called Edison at Work, the main feature of which is Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, NJ complex that includes his machine shop, several smaller buildings and his main laboratory, which is shown below. Notice all the copper wires running to the lab from the upper right corner of the picture.

Thomas Edison was one of the most prolific inventors of all time with over 1,000 U. S. patents, and many in Europe as well, in his name. Most of those inventions came from the Menlo Park lab.

On the first floor of the lab, an interpreter demonstrated the use of an actual, 130-year old Edison phonograph. By shouting into a cone, the operator's voice vibrates a needle to make indentations in tin foil wrapped around a cylinder (left). For the playback, the indentations vibrate a needle attached to a diaphragm, and a larger megaphone amplifies the sound (right). This type of phonograph was first made in 1878. The phonographs that recorded onto wax cylinders came a little later.

The second floor of the lab has many of the thousands of bottles and jars originally located in Edison's lab.

It was on the second floor of the lab where Edison developed the first practical light bulb. Edison didn't invent the light bulb - there were over 20 people who had created some sort of electric light bulb before him. However, through perseverance, Edison found the proper combination of filament material (he used carbonized bamboo), vacuum and electrical resistance that enabled the light bulb to work for extended periods outside the laboratory. There are numerous reproductions of early Edison light bulbs throughout the Edison at Work area.

 

The next area of Greenfield Village is called Porches and Parlors, which is a collection of homes. Our first stop was at Cotswold Cottage, which was a stone mason's cottage originally built in England in the early 1600s.

Henry Ford's wife admired English cottage gardens, and the one at Cotswold Cottage is beautiful.

Margery had read about tea at Cotswold Cottage. Margery loves to "do tea," but Paul wasn't too enthusiastic initially. However, the cottage is located at just about the farthest point in Greenfield Village from the entrance; and by the time we got there, we were hot, tired, hungry and thirsty. Paul agreed it would be nice to sit a while and have something to eat and drink.

Cotswold Cottage only serves one thing - afternoon tea consisting of tea sandwiches, cookies and scones for $12 a person. Fortunately, you can substitute iced tea for the traditional hot tea. The photo below shows our assortment of tea sandwiches (bottom), cookies and scones (top).

When our food arrived, the conversation went something like this:

Paul - Doesn't look like much food for $24.

Margery - It's about the experience.

Paul - For $24, we should be able to experience being full.

Seriously, the food was good, if not plentiful. We also had a nice place to sit in the shade surrounded by flowers to rest our feet for a while. The iced tea really hit the spot, too.

After we finished our tea, we headed back through the Porches and Parlors area by a different street. There are a total of about 15 to 20 old homes, some relatively ordinary and some belonging to well-known people like Robert Frost (poet), William McGuffey (writer of McGuffey Readers), and Stephen Foster (song writer). Stephen Foster's house from Lawrenceville, PA near Pittsburgh is shown below.

  

There is a reproduction of the log cabin belonging to George Washington Carver. Carver was born a slave and became a well-known scientist who experimented with peanuts and sweet potatoes.

The last area of Greenfield Village we visited was back near the entrance and is called Henry Ford's Model T. Henry Ford was born in 1863 in the farmhouse in the photo below in Greenfield Township near Detroit.

Ford's father always expected him to take over the family farm, but Ford despised farm work. He was interested in things mechanical, and he left home when he was 16 to become an apprentice machinist in Detroit.

In 1891, Ford became an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. We showed a photo of a replica of the generating station where he worked in our last post. While he was employed at Edison Illuminating, Ford experimented with gasoline engines on his own time. In 1896, Ford completed his first motor car he called the Quadricycle because it used 4 bicycle tires.

After Ford finished building the Quadricycle in the small workshop behind his home, he realized it was too big to fit out the door. He solved that problem by picking up an axe and enlarging the door opening.

In the same year Ford built his first Quadricycle, he attended a meeting where he met Thomas Edison. Edison approved of Ford's automobile experimentation and encouraged him to keep at it.

In 1899, Ford resigned from Edison Illuminating and formed the Detroit Automobile Company. The company failed and was dissolved less than two years later.

Later in 1901, Ford joined with a number of investors and formed the Henry Ford Company with Ford as the chief engineer. Ford left the company in 1902; and with Ford gone, the company was renamed the Cadillac Automobile Company. Cadillac was bought up by the General Motors conglomerate in 1909.

Ford formed his third and final automobile company in 1902. This company was reincorporated in 1903 as the Ford Motor Company. The photo below shows a one-quarter size replica of Ford's first factory located in Detroit.

  

Inside the factory, Paul posed for a photo with the 15 millionth Ford that was on display. This Model T rolled off the assembly line on May 26, 1927.

  

The Ford Motor Company was born in 1903, but the Model T didn't come along until 1908. Up until the Model T, automobiles were all hand built and were very expensive. Henry Ford came up with a design that was simple, that had interchangeable parts, and that could be mass produced making it affordable to the middle class. With that, he changed automobiles and manufacturing for all products forever.

The Model T was produced until 1927 at which time it was replaced by the Model A. Ford called the replacement the Model A rather than the Model U because they said it was such a radical departure from the Model T that they wanted to start all over with the name.

Greenfield Village is extremely well done, and we loved our visit. There are interpreters in almost every building who present a history of the building and answer questions. The village is also big. We spent almost 5 hours there, and we still skimmed through some of the buildings and exhibits.

We had a few miscellaneous things planned for the weekend, then we planned to hit the ground running on Monday with more sightseeing. Stay tuned.

Greenfield Village

Milford, MI - Events of Thursday, August 25, to Friday, August 26, 2011

It was about a four-hour drive from Traverse City to our next stop in Milford, MI where we stayed at Camp Dearborn. Camp Dearborn is a 626-acre park that is run by the city of Dearborn. It was opened in 1948 and it was known as "the citizens' country club."

Camp Dearborn has a campground that includes full-hookup RV sites, electric-only sites, no-hookup tent sites, and cabin and tent rentals. There is also a canteen that has a fairly extensive snack menu and several lakes and ponds for swimming, fishing and paddle boats. There is a mini-golf course and a full-size 18-hole golf course.

The roads and RV pads in Camp Dearborn are paved, and the sites are grassy and fairly widely spaced. The photo below shows our site at Camp Dearborn.

Most of the full-hookup sites have full sun while the electric-only and tent sites have shade. Unfortunately for pet lovers, Camp Dearborn has a "no pets" policy. Except for traffic noise during the day (our site was fairly close to the road) and some noisy neighbors who showed up a few sites away from us toward the end of our stay, the campground was fairly quiet.

The next photo shows the view down the road from our site.

It was cloudy all day for our drive to Milford, but just before sunset, the clouds rolled back and allowed the setting sun to peek under the clouds and illuminate them with an orange glow.

We had several things we wanted to do while staying in Milford, so with the skys clearing the evening before, we headed into Dearborn the next morning to visit Greenfield Village. Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum together were formerly known as the Edison Institute. Today, they are known simply as The Henry Ford. The Henry Ford also includes an IMAX Theater and serves as the departure point for a factory tour of the nearby Rouge Complex which contains 6 Ford factories including one that manufactures Ford trucks.

We planned to visit both the museum and the village, but since the weather was nice, we went to Greenfield Village first. We'll have more about the Henry Ford Museum in an upcoming post.

Admission to the village is $22 ($21 for seniors over 62), and admission for the museum is $15 ($14 for seniors). There are combo tickets available for $32 ($30 for seniors), but the campground has combo tickets available at an even better price of $24. Not only that, but when we were at the ticket window exchanging the vouchers we got at the campground for regular tickets, Paul overheard the people at other ticket windows being asked if they drove there. When they said they did, there was an extra $5 charge for parking. We were not charged the additional parking fee.

The Edison Institute was originally dedicated in 1929. It was named for Thomas Edison who was a friend of Henry Ford. Ford wanted to show how Americans lived and worked since the founding of the country. There are almost 100 buildings that were moved from their original locations to Dearborn and arranged in a village-like setting. 

Entry to the village is by way of the Josephine Ford Fountain, named for Henry Ford's granddaughter.

In addition to walking, there are several other ways to get around Greenfield Village. The Weiser Railroad travels around the perimeter of the village, and there are three stops. Tickets are $4, or you can buy an all-day pass good for all rides and transportation for $10.

The horse-drawn omnibus makes several stops around the village. Omnibus rides are only available on the all-day pass.

You can also ride a restored Model T for $4 (also included in the all-day pass), but the Model Ts make no stops along their designated route. We considered getting all-day ride passes, but since the stops of the various means of transportation were limited, we decided to walk.

Greenfield Village is so big it's almost overwhelming. It took us a while to get oriented and to come up with a plan of how to see as much as possible. The village is divided into several areas with different themes. Once we realized that, and once we decided to walk rather than try to figure out transportation routes and stops, it made our navigation a little easier.

The first area inside the entrance is called Working Farms. This area includes displays of soybean research, farm equipment, and the farm home belonging to the parents of Harvey Firestone. Harvey Firestone was the founder of Firestone Tire and Rubber and a friend of Henry Ford. The home was built in 1828 near Columbiana, OH.

The Firestone farm is set up as a working farm where sheep and vegetables are raised. There was a cooking demonstration going on in the kitchen.

In the basement, we had just missed the demonstration of cutting cabbage to make sauerkraut. Also in the basement was the fruit cellar where root crops, canned goods, hams and cheese were stored.

Next, we came to an area of the village called Liberty Craftworks where there are several mills and shops that demonstrate old time crafts. In the next photo, Paul is checking out some of the lumber stored outside the Spofford Sawmill.

Some of the buildings in Greenfield Village are original, some are reconstructions using components from original buildings, and others are total reconstructions. The Spofford Sawmill above is reconstructed using some of the components that came from the Spofford Sawmill originally located in Georgetown, MA.

The Weaving Shop in the next photo was moved to Greenfield Village from Georgia, and it is mostly original. The lower floor, however, was intended to be open to allow access for horses to the drive mechanism for the cotton gin located on the enclosed, upper floor. The lower floor was left open for a time after relocating the building to Greenfield Village, and it was later enclosed and now houses looms where various fabrics and rugs are woven.

The Pottery Shop shown below was built in Greenfield Village in the 1930s. Numerous potters work inside creating clay pots, mugs, jugs and tiles. Like most of the Greenfield Village crafts, the pottery is for sale in the Liberty Craftworks Store.

We particularly enjoyed a demonstration of tin smithing in the Tin Shop. Back in the day, the tin smith would have used a charcoal fire to heat his soldering irons; but for reasons of fire safety, they now use a direct flame from an alcohol burner. Alcohol doesn't burn at a high enough temperature to melt solder, so the smithy uses a blow pipe to increase the airflow to the flame and increase its temperature.

We also watched a fascinating demonstration of glass blowing. The artisans use 19th century techniques, but they enjoy the use of 20th century furnaces.

After spending a good bit of time in the Liberty Craftworks area watching numerous craft demonstrations, we made our way to the adjacent area, which is called Railroad Junction. Railroad Junction has an 1884 roundhouse from Marshall, MI.

Workers in the roundhouse service the rolling stock and locomotives used at Greenfield Village.

Near the roundhouse is a scaled-down reproduction of the Edison Illuminating Company Station A from Detroit where Henry Ford worked as a steam engineer in the 1890s. Power plants like this one helped light entire communities.

From Railroad Junction, we headed to Main Street, which is the heart of Greenfield Village. We'll tell you about Main Street and the rest of our visit to Greenfield Village in our next post.

Whitefish Point

Sault Sainte Marie, MI - Events of Monday, August 8, 2011

Whitefish Point, which is a sharp peninsula near the eastern end of Lake Superior, is about an hour and a half drive from Sault Sainte Marie. There are several things of interest in that general area, so we decided to take a day trip to check it out.

As we found out on our hike at Au Sable Point when we saw the remnants of shipwrecks on the beach, the area from Au Sable Point to Whitefish Point is known as "shipwreck coast." There were at least 550 major shipwrecks on Lake Superior, and 200 of them were in the vicinity of Whitefish Point. This area is treacherous because of the amount of boat traffic (the lake funnels down at Whitefish Point into Whitefish Bay, then narrows further to the St. Marys River), and because of weather (Lake Superior is the largest, deepest, and northernmost of the Great Lakes, so it gets more than its share of rough water).

With all the shipwrecks in the area of Whitefish Point, it is a fitting location for the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The latest shipwreck on Lake Superior was the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. The Fitzgerald went down, and all 29 hands were lost in a storm about 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point.

The Shipwreck Museum was built in 1987 on the site of the Whitefish Point Light Station and Coast Guard Lifeboat Station, which are also inbcluded in the admission to the museum.

It was a long drive all the way out to the Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, so we were surprised to see so many cars there.

When we arrived, the 15-minute video about the Edmund Fitzgerald was just about to start, so we went to see that first. We'll have more information on the Fitzgerald a little later in this post. After the video, we took the boardwalk over the dunes to the beach at Whitefish Point. The boardwalk protects the dunes from foot traffic.

The quiet, blue water the day we were there belied the potentially violent nature of Lake Michigan.

The U. S. Coast Guard operated a lifeboat rescue station on Whitefish point from 1923 until 1951. There is a replica of an 8-man surf boat on display. The brave rescuers would often row out into heavy storms to rescue sailors whose boat was in trouble.

If the boat was closer to shore, they could use a small cannon to fire a special projectile out to a boat that was in trouble. A light line would be attached to the projectile. The sailors on the ship could then use the light line to pull a heavier rescue line from the reels on the cart shown in the next photo. The sailors had to fasten the rescue line to a high point on the ship so they could slide down the rope in a sling.

The first light house at Whitefish Point was first lit in 1849. It was one of the first lighthouses on Lake Superior. The current light station was built in 1861 from iron and steel.

The light keeper's house is furnished the way it would have been back in the 1920s when Robert Carlson was light keeper. Carlson served from 1903 to 1931 and was Whitefish Point's longest-serving keeper.

From the light keeper's house, we headed to the Shipwreck Museum itself. On the way, we paused for a photo by the huge rudder from a wooden steamship, the M. M Drake. The Drake sank in a storm 6 miles west of Whitefish Point in 1901.

In addition to showing old footage of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald and telling the story of how she sank, the movie we saw when we first arrived at the museum showed how the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society participated in a dive to bring up the bell of the ship in 1995. The wreck is in Canadian waters 530 feet below the surface. The pressurized dive suit used in the recovery is called a "Newt Suit," and it is on display in the museum.

The expedition brought up the ship's bell, which is also on display.

 

A replica of the original bell engraved with the names of the 29 crew members who were lost was placed at the site of the wreck as a memorial. The original bell was used in a memorial service before being placed in the museum.

The museum also has artifacts and information on dozens of lesser-known shipwrecks from Lake Superior.

One of the most noticible exhibits in the museum is the second order Fresnel (pronounced frey-NEL) lens from White Shoals about 20 miles west of Mackinac Island in Lake Michigan.

The Shipwreck Museum was very interesting and very well done. We spent much more time there than we anticipated. From the museum, we headed south about 10 miles to the little town of Paradise, MI, then about 10 miles west on M123 to Tahquamenon (pronounced tah-KWAH-men-on) Falls State Park. Tahquanenon Falls State Park is a 50,000-acre park around a series of waterfalls on the Tahquemenon River.

Although the state highway runs right through the park, there are two day-use areas in the vicinity of the Upper Falls and the Lower Falls that charge an admission of $8 per vehicle. The pass is good all day for both areas. We came first to the Lower Falls area, so we made that our initial stop. Like Amnicon Falls State Park we visited about a month ago in Wisconsin, this river also divides and forms an island. The Lower Falls area has falls on both sides of the island.

The trail to the falls to the left of the island (below) is only accessible by renting a boat and rowing to the island. Unlike Amnicon Falls, there is no bridge here. We passed on the rowboat, so we can only show you a telephoto shot of the falls on the left side of the island.

However, we took the boardwalk approximately ½ mile to the falls to the right of the island so we were able to get a closer look. Like Amnicon Falls, the water is stained brown by tannin that comes from the swamps at the headwaters of the river.

The largest falls on the Tahquamenom River is the Upper Falls. The parking area for the Upper Falls is 4 or 5 miles farther down the road, then it is about a ¼-mile walk on a wide, paved path. The river does not divide here so all the water goes over the Upper Falls.

On the way back to the car, we stopped by the DNR display for a photo.

We didn't spend a lot of time hiking at Tahquemenon Falls State Park because we were already tired from tromping all over the grounds of the Shipwreck Museum. It was also late, and we were hungry. We knew we would be gone all day, and we deliberately didn't pack a lunch because we planned a stop for the 2011 Zeller Foodie Tour at a restaurant in Paradise, MI called Brown's Fisheries and Fish House. We had heard from fellow RVers that Brown's has excellent Great Lakes whitefish.

The fish at Brown's is about as fresh as you can get. The waitress, whose grandfather started the business in the 1920s, said her father and brother were in the back cleaning fish caught that morning. Once the fish caught that day is gone, the restaurant closes. They sell several varieties of smoked fish by the pound as well as eat-in and take-out restaurant meals.

We both had two-piece, fried whitefish baskets that included fries or baked potato (we had fries) and slaw for $10. We had heard the smoked fish dip and the fish chowder were excellent, but they were out of both. We hear that frequently happens by mid-afternoon.

The fish was outstanding. It was firm and mild-flavored. The batter coating was light and crispy, and not at all oily.

After our early dinner, we headed back to the motor home. We had a couple of very busy days in Sault Sainte Marie, so we just enjoyed the rest of our time hanging around the motor home watching the big ships go by the campground.