Vacation: Duluth

This past Monday, May 6, Maisie had the day off school for one of those random record-keeping or teacher in-service days. I figured I might as well give myself the day off, too. So we headed up north to Duluth, where we'd made a reservation at one of the girls' favorite places - Edgewater Resort & Waterpark. We stayed there Saturday through Monday.

We had a blast playing in the water park! You'll have to take my word for it, though - I didn't manage to take any pictures.

I did manage to get some pictures on Sunday afternoon, though, when we took a break from playing in the water to head down to Canal Park, which is a semi-touristy area right on the waterfront.

 One of Duluth's unique attractions is the aerial lift bridge. When a ship needs to come through that's too tall for the bridge, instead of it breaking in the middle and the two halves pulling up, the whole bottom part lifts straight up!


Ella as "Balance Panda"

So first, of course, we had to watch the bridge go up and down as a ship came through. It was kind of chilly, though, so once the bridge was on its way back down, we headed indoors to the Lake Superior Maritime Museum, which is far more interesting than I thought it would be. It presents the history of shipping on the Great Lakes. So on the top level, there's telescopes so you can watch the ships come in, and some fun hands-on exhibits.

Shipping on Lake Superior is not without its tragedies, of course. The museum displays multiple artifacts that have been recovered from shipwrecks... including this very famous wreck.

Once we'd had our fill of the museum, we went down to the lakeside to climb on rocks and to look for additions to our rock collection!

There's a wooden lakewalk that goes quite a ways down the length of the waterfront, and then these HUGE boulders all piled from the lakewalk to the shore that are oh-so-tempting to climb on.

See? really huge!

Some of the rocks have these holes drilled in them. I wasn't sure what they were from at first, but I think I figured it out.

A sign said that the rocks were from when MN-DOT was finishing Interstate 35's route through the east side of Duluth. So my guess is that the holes were drilled for blasting through the hillsides. What do you think?

As we walked, we all looked at the little rocks, too, for interesting additions to our rock collection. We found a LOT of different rocks (and I emptied a lot of rocks out of the girls' pockets!). Here are the ones we ended up bringing home:

Clockwise from the top: sea glass, gabbro, an agate!, quartz that might reveal some hematite bands if we take a rock hammer to it (a.k.a. stealth agate!!), red & black basalt? rhyolite, and either basalt or flint.

Geology rocks!

We headed back on Monday after a fun, relaxing long weekend. And for all the fun we had at the water park, Maisie and Ella both said that their favorite part of the trip was climbing on the rocks. It was a great time, and we're already planning our next Duluth adventure.