We discovered the Spirit Lake area in Iowa a couple of years ago when we drove down from Jackson. Minnesota, where we were attending a three-day dirt track race.  We were looking for Josie's pottery and she hit the mother lode at an antique mall in the area. After that we drove over to Lake Okoboji to check out the rest of the area and it looked like a nice place to spend more time. So, we made a note of it and planned for a visit this summer. 

First things first, we went back to the antique mall and Josie again found a very nice and rare piece for her collection. We tried a few other pieces in the area but to no avail.

Then we drove over to our mail service Dakota Post in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to pick up mail we had not had delivered since we left Lake Orion, Michigan over 6 weeks ago. The mail run gave us a chance to check out the top rated place for "Chislic" in Southeast South Dakota,  the Red Rock Bar and Grill in Rowena. Chislic is very popular in South Dakota and is the official nosh food of the state. It consists of cubes of red meat that have been dredged in flour seasoned with garlic and other spices, then deep fried in hot oil and served with a dipping sauce of some sort. I like BBQ but most use a hot sauce or ranch dressing. You use large tooth picks instead of a fork to eat them. It is one of those regional foods that we have discovered in our travels. Another regional food that is not so localized as Chislic, but more over all midwestern is the pork tenderloin sandwich. A pork tenderloin is butterflied, pounded out for tenderization, dredged in seasoned flour and then fried in oil. It is served on a bun that is never large enough to hold it and garnished with mayo, or horseradish mayo, pickles lettuce and tomato. I grew up eating these as a kid and had to find the best place in the area to have one for dinner. 

When we were in the area a few years ago they were giving tours of the Indian Motorcycle Factory located in Lake Okoboji. We were too late in the day to take one and had planned on taking a tour during this visit. But they are no longer giving tours and all you can do is look at some of the old and new cycles and buy merchandise. 

The town of Arnolds Park on Lake Okoboji is famous for its 150-year-old music hall, the Roof Garden Ballroom. It is now in its fourth rebuild after fires and tornados had taken it down over the years. It has been host to so many famous musical acts over all these years that it would be impossible to list them all. So when we found out the Grass Roots were going to be there we decide to see the show. As the lead singer said this was music's version of the senior tour and a Q tip convention, because of all the gray heads in the building. They put on a great show for a bunch of guys in their 70s, although none of them are from the original group. 

We drove to Kansas City and I was able to visit with my mother who is 95 and in a nursing home. At first, I was told she could not have visitors because of Corvid protocols but with a little persistence and a quick covid test I was able to visit for a short period of time. She seems to be doing well despite being so isolated. The Delta variant is a threat here in Missouri and there is a mask mandate in the KC area. I stopped by my father and brother's grave sites and since my brother was always lighting church votive candles for us when he was alive, I left battery powered ones on Tom's and my father's grave. We spent our last evening in town having dinner with my brother's best friend Doug and his wife Cindy. They were truly great friends to my brother. We met at Jack Stack BBQ one of our favorite places when we are in my home town of KC. 

The Wisconsin Dells bills itself as the Indoor Water Park Capital of the World. That is why Josie wanted to visit here, to see how many she could visit in a week. If you know Josie then you know that is false, but thousands of people from all over the Midwest come here for the water parks and I think that most of them came the week we were here. Honestly it's a pretty tacky place. 

We chose the Dells because it was located an equal distance from The House on the Rock and Sand Valley Golf Resort.

Our friends Tommy Fisher and Leon Hoots have told us for years that we had to visit the House on the Rock. It is hard to explain exactly what it is but it is definitely a whole lot more than a house. Alex Jordan built his house on the rock outcropping and then over many years collected so much stuff he had to build multiple warehouses to store and display it in. There is not enough time or space for me to list the many collections he procured over the years but I will give a few highlights. Once you enter the grounds you start seeing weird flower pots all along the driveway.  Then as you walk to the house you go through a beautiful garden. The Infinity room is an over 200-foot room that extends out over the valley from the house and has over three thousand windows for great views of the surrounding area. There is the worlds largest indoor carousel, a multitude of coin operated music makers some with over 100 musicians. He collected Tiffany Lamps and also has over 200 Doll Houses. This only begins to scratch the surface of his collections. You might want to go on line to see the full extent of what he collected. The whole experience was over whelming to say the least. 

Sand Valley Golf Resort has two of Golf Digest's best courses that the public can play. The Valley Course ranked #18 and Mammoth Dunes ranked #27. I played the Dunes course. Both courses are walking only, so I opted to get a caddy and I was assigned a very personable young lady named Taylor, who has been caddying for 4 years when she was home from school for the summer. 

The course basically went up and over a huge sand dune three or four times. Who knew there were t big sand dunes in Wisconsin? The course definitely lived up to its name, Mammoth Dunes, sand waste areas and traps everywhere. Fortunately, you were allowed to ground your club and remove your ball from foot prints in all sand areas. With Taylors help I played very well and was only in the sand twice. My phone fitness App said I walked 6.8 miles during the round. 

As I said the Dells are a very touristy place. We did make reservations for a sunset dinner cruise but it was canceled due to high water on the river. Besides the 20 waterparks there are lots of other attractions, like the Ducks amphibious rides, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, magic shows, go carts rides, indoor skydiving, you name it, they have it and more than one of each. 
 
We only went into the tourist area one evening to eat dinner at an Italian restaurant that had lobster ravioli, one of Josie's favorite meals. That made up for the dinner cruise we missed. 

On my drive to the golf course, I saw a sign for the Corn and Tater Festival in Grand Marsh. So we decided to check it out. We purchased food tickets for a full plate of food. Included was a tasty beef sandwich, a red potato and an ear of corn. You could go back for as much corn and potatoes you could eat, till they ran out of food. Looking at the pile of corn next to the cooking pavilion I don't think they would ever run out. The children's tractor pull was very entertaining but we saw a sign for a Chicken Drop and there was a big crowd so we had to find out what the buzz was about. One or two chickens were placed in a round pen with 25 numbered sections marked on it. People paid two dollars each for one of those numbers and when a chicken pooped on that number you won half the money. It is amazing how often a chicken poops, the longest we had to wait for a winner was about 5 minutes. Definitely something we had never seen before and something we will not forget. It was a lot of fun. 

I had not been out birding in a long time. The heat of the summer is not usually a very productive time for seeing birds, but when a cool front came through on Friday, I decided to try my luck the next morning.  I drove the 35 miles north to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge and as you can see below it was a crisp 47 degrees at 7:18 AM. 

I was surprised to find three Whooping Cranes on the refuge ; an endangered bird that I rarely ever get to see. The picture below is of poor quality since they were very far away and my camera and just maybe my eyesight are not so great anymore, but you can clearly see they are Whooping Cranes. They may have bands on their legs, just can't say for sure. I also saw at least 5 pairs of Sandhill Cranes.  I was surprised to see 5 warbler species. In all I tallied 42 species, and lots of butterflies too.  It turned out to be a good birding day.   

We have spent a very busy past week in Door County, Wisconsin, a peninsula that goes northwest from Green Bay out into Lake Michigan. This area is sometimes called the Cape Cod of the Great Lakes because of all the lighthouses and small towns along the shores of the lake

The first lighthouse we went to see was the Cana Island Light. We parked the Jeep and walked toward the island which we thought had a walkway to it, only to find out you had to wade over in knee deep water. Josie did not have suitable shoes on and did not want to do it barefooted so I took off in my flip flops to at least go over and take a picture of the lighthouse. When I was halfway across, I hear a commotion behind me and see a wagon pulled by a tractor with a smiling Josie high and dry in the wagon, with her new friends Tom and Sarah. 

From there we drove down to Sturgeon Bay and checked out the Canal Light and the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal Pierhead Lighthouse. The walk out to the pierhead was along the breakwater.

​The Eagle Bluff Lighthouse is located in Peninsula State Park, where they also have a sightseeing tower that was just rebuilt. It was a nice walk to the top with a scenic view of the Strawberry Islands in the distance. The Park is also home to the outdoor Northern Sky Theater. We attended a performance of "Tongue' in Cheek" which was exactly as the title insinuates, a pun filled musical comedy. In spite of starting out in a light rain the talented cast put on a fantastic performance of comedy, song and dance. 

As we drove around the peninsula we stopped at a few farmers markets, many of which had wooden figures out front to advertise.  We bought a lot of baked goods, jams and salsas.  We also looked in a few antique stores for Josie's pottery.

Many towns in our travels have street art on the corners of their downtown, we have seen cows, horses, pigs and even guitars. The town of Sturgeon Bay has chosen cherries for their street corners, because of the abundance of cherry orchards on the peninsula. 

In the town of Egg Harbor, we stopped and had a tasty meat loaf dinner and stout beer at the Shipwrecked Brew Pub.

​One evening we went to see the Disney Movie, Jungle Cruise at the Skyway Drive In near the town of Fish Creek. The movie was just ok but it was fun to see it at the drive in. The main street of Fish Creek looks as much today as it did over 100 years ago, but we are sure there were no shops then selling $125 Hawaiian shirts as there is today. 

Driving up to the town of Ellison Bay to see the Ellison Bluffs we drove through a very curvy section of Highway 42. It is said the road design was influenced by the famed landscape architect Jens Jensen who summered in the area. He designed many of the parks in Chicago and other cities in the Midwest.

From there we drove to the Door County Brewery in the town of Baileys Harbor. We snacked on a giant soft pretzel and washed it down with a nice Porter beer.   

Sisters Bay is the largest town north of Sturgeon Bay and its biggest claim to fame are the goats on the roof at Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant. We had seen this same concept on Vancouver Island in British Columbia while visiting our friends Tom and Diane. It was a lot more realistic on Vancouver Island since the building was built right into the side of a hill and the goats could come and go as they pleased. We did not eat at the restaurant as the lines were always long and the reviews were only good for the food and not great. We chose to go out to dinner at the top rated Waterfront restaurant in Sisters Bay to celebrate Josie's birthday. Of course, she had the Shrimp and Grits. On our last afternoon in town we had a nice lunch snack of sliders at the bar of one of the many outside eateries in Sisters Bay, 

My weekly round of golf this week was at the Peninsula State Park Golf Course. The course logo is of a bear on top of a totem pole that was erected in 1927 to honor the Potawatomi First Nation. The pole now sits just off the 1st fairway of the course.  The signature hole is number 8, a 69-yard par three, that as its name implies is just a Drop Shot. There were many cardboard coyotes around the greens to keep the geese off. Some holes were tucked into the sides of rock walls and many had great views of Eagle Harbor and the town of Ephraim. 

 We left "The Tip of the Mitt" and drove over the Mackinaw Bridge to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, or  the "Yoop" as the Yoopers call it.  Our first stay was in Sault Ste. Marie, on the northern border with Canada. Our campground was right on the St Mary's River and we really enjoyed watching the Great Lake Freighters coming and going between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. There are many shapes and sizes of them and we did see two of the 1000 footers, the largest of the ships that ply these waters. I was even able to watch one of the freighters go by while playing my weekly round of golf at the Sault Ste. Marie Country Club. 

 We decided to take the tour boat that takes you through the locks and experience the rise and fall of the water ourselves. As you can see below, there was a 30-foot difference from Superior down to Huron. The tour boat also took us by the Sault Ste. Marie power plant which was completed in 1902 and is still being used today. It is over a quarter mile long and made from the local red sandstone.  After our trip we had a nice dinner where we sampled three kinds of fish, Whitefish, Perch and Walleye. Of course, Josie also had the shrimp cocktail.  

On Sunday, we drove out to see the Point Iroquois Lighthouse. It was very nice even though it was closed on Sunday. 

We spent our second week in the western UP city of Marquette. Once again this was a place we had passed through in our pre RV travels and said we would like to get back to. The Lower Harbor Ore Dock dominates the city's waterfront. It is no longer used since they built a newer ore dock up the lake shore. Many of the town's buildings, including the City Hall are made from the same rock that the ore comes from. While we were there, the annual Blueberry Festival was held on the main street. You could purchase everything or anything blueberry, crepes, muffins and even beer. 

We had made reservations to go out on the tour boat to see Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore but the winds were so strong we decided that with my propensity to get sea sick and Josie not liking to go out on the water so much, we passed on the trip. We did however walk the trails around Presque Isle Park in Marquette and saw a few of the lake side cliffs from above. In the Black Rocks area of the park the locals were diving off the rocks in the 66-degree air and 64-degree water. Josie and I decided we will come back and jump off when the water temperature reaches 85. Just down from Presque Isle the large red Marquette Lighthouse sits above harbor.

The number 1 rated restaurant on Trip Advisor is Jean Kay's Pasties. If you have never had one they are meat pies with onion, potato and rutabaga. We liked them so much we ate there twice during our week stay. We also picked up some more smoked whitefish to take with us down into Wisconsin where we will pick up some cheese to eat with it. 

​We found a lot of quirky sites in and around the city.  The Lakenenland Sculpture Garden was one of them. For 25 years Tom Lakenen, a local boiler welder, has made over 100 creative sculptures from junk and placed them on his woodland property for all to see for free. 

We found Sasquatch on the main street in Munising, Michigan and Santa at the North Pole in Christmas, Michigan.  At the Jilbert Dairy in Marquette we found Bossy the cow and some fantastic ice cream. 

My weekly round of golf was at the Graywalls Course at the Marquette Golf Club. It is the second best public course you can play in Michigan. It was a very stern test of golf but very scenic with a lot of fantastic holes sculptured in and around the natural gray rock formations.