Duluth

We woke up Tuesday to a forecast of dreary and drizzly so we decided to swim downstream and check out Duluth. We perused all the tourist literature and then took the advice of our neighbors who told us about a big cargo ship you could tour.

The William A. Irwin is a retired cargo ship that used to haul taconite. We toured the entire ship with our tour guide, Matt. He was nice, informative, but didn't think my little Luke asking questions was adorable. Here's Matt in the center in the engine room. Wow! That was impressive! It would get over 110 degrees in there. No wonder pictures of my dad shows him so skinny. He sweat it all off! A very good stop if you are in Duluth.

Then we decided to check out this train museum since it was rainy out. Once we got there, we decided to take a train ride instead. Well, it was nice to sit down for over an hour, but personally we didn't see that much, so instead we took pictures of each other.

On the way home our neighbors again told us to stop at Betty's Pies. So since we needed supper, we did! Yep! Good food, good pies! 
But all that indoorsy stuff made us antsy and we went down to the shore near our hotel. The day before we figured out that if you can do it without breaking your neck, you are pretty much allowed to scramble or climb anything you want to. 

In this next pic, you can see the shore cropping nearest and I figured out how to get all the way up there. It really wasn't that high but you still had to be careful, especially with 4 year olds.

While we were up there, 3 teenage boys came tearing up and knew just where to dive off into the icy cold water! I was going to ask if I could take their pictures, but 2 of the 3 had already gone and one apparently had decided boxers only were good enough, so I left them alone (well, after I gave them my "If your mother only knew what you were doing" eye). Up along that ridge we explored the shore over in that area and found some huge rocks to walk on. I didn't get any pictures there because I was too busy playing (fully clothed)!


As we were headed back to our car, I asked the kids what they would rather do: Go see trains and boats, etc. or go climb rocks, explore trails and skip rocks all day. They chose the second. And that pretty much summed up the difference between our Florida vacation and our Minnesota vacation. The weather was a huge factor in our Florida vacation. It was not nice. What we hoped to do was play at the beach, but instead we ended up driving around trying to find things to do the whole time and it left us cranky. Minnesota was no Mickey, no canned activities, no expectations that this would be the greatest vacation of all time. It would just be Minnesota and maybe we would see a couple waterfalls and a lighthouse and it turned out great.