The Hunt for Lighthouses and Other Musings

Yesterday evening we took a drive and ended up in Mackinaw City for a look around. We found the famous Ft. Mackinaw Light. If you look closely, you should be able to see the bridge in the lower left.


Here's a busy corner - you can see a fudge shop, really can't take a picture in town without one in it!



I've been confused about the pronunciation of the name of this place. Sometimes I see Mackinac and sometimes I see Mackinaw. We found an article in the paper today that says it doesn't matter how it's spelled, it's always supposed to pronnounced as Mackinaw. Hmmm....

After my post yesterday about Jim being so frustrated with his computer, I took it away from him. Actually, I wanted to see if I could figure out anything. I suspected we were dealing with a conflict with the program Spy Sweeper, which we had installed by Best Buy when we bought this laptop. I managed to start it in Safe Mode and got Spy Sweeper uninstalled. When that went away, the laptop seemed much happier! I was able to get it moving again and downloaded Spybot. I got a scan done and now it seems to be behaving just fine. I told Jim since we saved the cost of of buying a new laptop, I would only charge him $500 for my work! Seems like a fair deal to me! Let's see, jewelry doesn't weigh much and it doesn't take up much room...

This morning, I took the camera with me when the dogs and I went for our walk. Here's a view of the straits and the Mackinaw Bridge from the campground.



After breakfast, we headed out going south on Highway23. I'd looked up some locations for lighthouses that we might be able to visit. It seems that a lot of lighthouses in this area are accessible only by boat, or not at all because they are now privately owned. But I did see a few south of here on the Lake Huron shore, so we went that way.

We first stopped in Cheboygen State Park. We never did find the lighthouse that's in the park, but we did get lost in these woods:

We drove down this tiny little road and eventually came to two houses. I could see a lighthouse out in the bay, so I jumped out of the car to get a picture while Jim turned the car around. I think this is Fourteen Foot Shoal Light.



Oops, turns out we'd left the state park and were actually on private property! Oh, well, sorry about that!

About 30 to 40 miles south of here, there's another lighthouse that is open to the public, and - free! (Speedy, make a note!) This turned out to be a great stop. The lighthouse is Forty Mile Point. The light keepers quarters have been restored and you can go up to the light where there's a volunteer to tell the story of the light. There is also a gift shop, of course.

I've just come down that staircase behind me - very carefully!

There is also the remains of part of the hull of a ship, the Joseph S. Fay, which crashed and sank off the point in about 1908.

Here's Jim, standing in front:

This butterfly added to our day's beauty:

We went out for our early dinner at a local restaurant. Then we came home and set up our patio. We'll have to wait for the sun to go down before we sit outside though, because the patio is in the bright afternoon sun, oh well. We don't mind!