It had to be a pretty quick stop, however, because we had plans for the day. Once a year, museums affiliated with the Smithsonian offer free admission. We went on-line to get our tickets to the Michigan Heritage Park in White Hall, and had beautiful weather to enjoy this outdoor site. It literally walks you through the history of Michigan, beginning with the Native Americans that built birch bark wigwams along this coast.
Unlike most museums that keep you at a distance behind velvet ropes, this museum invites you in to each of the exhibits and encourages you to touch everything. For example, they had an atlatl set up for us to try. We have learned from other museums that an atlatl is a crazy word for a hand-held spear launcher. The display was complete with a volunteer that was happy to show us how to hold the launcher, and then gave us tips on how to fling that spear towards the deer decoy in the woods.
Let's hope that we won't have to depend on Denisa's atlatl skills to survive. Let's just say that when it came time to retrieve the spears that we had launched, Denisa didn't have to walk very far to pick hers up. On the other hand, Mark got a nice walk in the woods to gather his spears.
As we walked further into the forest, we came to the next item on the Michigan history time line--the fur traders' hut. It was filled with--you guessed it--furs that we were encouraged to touch.
Our next stop was an early settler's rough log cabin. The volunteer team here was working on a sheep-to-shawl project today. That means they took the wool fresh off a sheep, and intended to perform all the steps in a single day to make it into a piece of fabric that could be worn as a shawl. Some were carding the wool on the cabin's porch, while these two ladies were taking that combed wool and spinning it into thread.
Inside the cabin, another volunteer was using that new thread to weave a shawl on the loom. They were just a couple hours from quitting time, and the shawl was only 7 inches long so far. They told us that there are actually sheep-to-shawl competitions where carding/spinning/weaving teams compete to see who can make the biggest piece of cloth in a timed event.
We've walked all the way to 1865, to the camp site of the Michigan regimen that fought in the Civil War. Volunteers in costume explained that no Civil War battles were fought in Michigan, but a large group of soldiers from here joined the Union forces early in the war. They lived in camps that looked like the one pictured below.
The next stop in our historical time line is a visit to a logging camp, where we got educated on how to use the tools of the lumberjack in these woods. We also got a colorful description of the way these boarding cabins must have smelled with twenty stinky lumberjacks living inside.
The final stop is the farm home, complete with chicken coop and outhouse.
Again, this is a very hands-on museum, as we were invited into the kitchen to help roll out a pie crust. It smelled delicious in the kitchen as the volunteer had just gotten a pie out of the wood-fired oven, and had dinner simmering in the blue pot on the stove.
Forget the "Don't Touch!" signs seen in most museums. Here you are encouraged to touch, including playing a tune on the old piano in the parlor. What a nice trip through Michigan's heritage, and it was all free because of the Smithsonian Museum special that happens once each year on a Saturday in the fall. This is the second time we've taken advantage of this offer, and we hope we remember to do it again next year.
While we were in Whitehall, we had to make another trip to the beach to see Lake Michigan. After all the winds and waves yesterday, the water is completely calm today.
We're here because Denisa had another lighthouse to check off her list. Who knew that Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state in the United States? Welcome to the White River Light Station!
On another day, we had made a bicycle trip from Muskegon towards the towns of White Hall and Montague on the Fred Meijer Berry Junction Trail. It was supposed to be a ten mile round-trip ride. But we are seeing some good fall foliage, so we just kept going . . .
and going . . .
Before we knew it, we had traveled the eleven miles to the town of Montague. Since we made it this far, we were looking for the town's entry into the Guinness Book of World Records--the world's largest working weather vane. At 48 feet tall, it makes Denisa (who is posing as a working weather vane underneath) look pretty small.
The ship on top of the weather vane is a replica of the Ella Ellenwood--a lumber ship lost in a storm in 1901 close to the harbor here.
By the time we rode the eleven more miles to get back to the car, the cloudy skies had cleared and we had blue-sky pictures. But Denisa has to be tricked into biking 22 miles, as her optimum bike trip length is something around ten miles.
On another day, we rode the bike trail in the city of Muskegon that has been recommended to us more than once. We are on the Lake Shore Trail that run besides Lake Muskegon.
We rode beside some of the marinas, where the big boy boats that cruise out onto Lake Michigan are parked.
We had great timing at the pier, getting to see the biggest ship that comes into the Muskegon channel. From the distance we could see that this was a massive catamaran, balanced on the two pontoons on the outside as the rest of the ship rides above the water.
We watched until the Lake Express entered the channel as it approached the lighthouse. This big boat is a car ferry that allows people and their cars to make the trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, across Lake Michigan without driving through that awful Chicago traffic.
The bike trail also wanders through city parks and lovely sections of the lake. The first time we passed this bridge, any entire wedding party was using it as a back-drop for pictures. On our return trip, it was filled with high-school students taking formal party pictures and stinky old fishermen--and an old retired couple from Oklahoma on bicycles.
It's been a great stay here in the Muskegon area, and after five days staying at the Elks Campground, we'll be heading down the road tomorrow after church. One of the Elks members invited us to go to church with them in the morning, so we're still enjoying the friendly welcome we've gotten here in Muskegon, Michigan!
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