A Beating from Your Sister

The days of summer are long gone, and now the color season has ended as well. Most of the shops in Copper Harbor have closed or are in the process of closing. My son-in-law's parents' place, the Minnetonka Motel and Thunderbird Gift Shop, are still operating, but on a limited schedule. Here's my last shot of summer, 2007, that I will post this year, as many shots as I would like to post. Late in the summer, the whole family got together one night after supper, a night when the Sunset Cruise had to be canceld, at the Tunderbird, on the corner at the blinking light. We all looked around the shop, as we do from time to time during the summer all around town. Miranda and Logan were having a friendly disagreement about something or other that I was not privy, and I caught Mir giving him a working-over to straighten out his attitude and to find out who's boss. Coming up next will be photos of the family down here in Okemos this fall.

Sandstone Shore

I go back a month and more to a shot of my niece Caroline Thomas (I hope I'm spelling her first name right) standing on the Lake Superior shore one windy day in August. This spot is about two miles west of Copper Harbor. We had taken a bike ride down M-26 to this spot. Caroline and her sister Christine came up from Houston, Texas to visit their aunt, my wife, Aunt Marsha and the rest of the famiy. It was the first time for either to visit Copper Harbor since we came back to our family business and began spending our summers in CH in 1993. It was a long way to come for a short stay of just four days or so. They flew from Houston to Milwaukee and then drove a rented car to CH. They had that experience of just how far everything is from CH on that drive north from southern Wisconsin, which took the better part of a day. We are used to the distances, but when you seldom drive up here, it can seem bewildering and daunting. In this photo, Caroline was getting ready to take a photo of the sweetwater waves tumbling in to show the folks back home in Texas. This is an interesting spot along the shore. It's mostly made of layers of conglomerate, or puddingstone, but there are a few of these bulging layers of sandstone here and there along the way. And that blue sky looks exactly the way the blue sky looks so often along Superior: ravishingly blue. I still have a few more summer shots I want to post, and hundreds I could post.