Traverse City and Leland

With hurricane Florance coming ashore in NC, our thoughts and prayers are with all of those in the path of this storm.  As I post this blog, we are thinking of all our friends in the Carolinas.  We hope all come through this storm with minimal damage.  Stay safe.

We arrived in Traverse City on Monday, September 10th.  This is a fairly nice sized town at the base of Grand Traverse bay.  It gained some notoriety when in 1852, the first European settler, Peter Dougherty, planted a small orchard of cherry trees.  To his amazement, the orchard flourished in the sandy soil and environment of the lake shore.  This started the cherry industry of Michigan.  Today Michigan produces 75% of the nation's cherries, and Traverse City calls itself the "Cherry Capital of the World".  Traverse City hosts the  National Cherry Festival each July.  Even though we missed the Cherry Festival, there were plenty of cherry products to be found in town.  I purchased some cherry jam and cherry salsa.  Both have been quite tasty.  There was also a specialty meat shop.  I stocked up the refrigerator.  They even had some really nice lamb which Captain Keith likes, so I purchased some lamb chops.

In addition to some shopping and a little bike ride through town on the bike trail, Captain Keith played golf on Tuesday and I had my hair touched up.

Bridge we crossed on the bikes over the Broadman River

View out into Grand Traverse Bay from the Marina

Wednesday we headed to Leland, Michigan.  We arrived later in the day around 3PM with the last hour being a bit nautical as the wind had kicked up.  Thursday was our full day in Leland and so we explored the town.  Leland was a fishing town for many years with old time fish shanties, ice houses, smoke houses, and other buildings associated with the fishing industry.  The town is actually often referred to as "Fishtown".  Today it is more of a tourist town, however they have preserved a portion of the old downtown fish shanties.

Fish shanties in downtown Leland

Dam on the Leland River just up from the old fish shanties

Old Great Lakes Fishing Boat

Many of the preserved shanties have small businesses inside now such as gift shops or sandwich shops.  There is also a place that sells smoked fish (Yum).

Mid afternoon on Thursday, Pengi and I took the kayak out onto the lake and down the shoreline to search for treasures.  We found a bunch of cool Petosky stones and even what we think are Leland stones.

Pengi helping search for stones

Some of our finds.  I still need to polish them and get a coat of laquer on them.

I also tried to get a picture of the Leland Blue Stones that I found.  These stones are quite unique and getting rare.  Back in the 1800s the town of Leland was a hub of the iron industry.  The Leland Blue stones are a by-product of this iron smelting industry.  Iron ore was heated to extreme temperatures in order to separate the metal from non-usable impurities.  Those impurities, when cooled, formed a blue tinted slag glass waste.  The waste was dumped into Lake Michigan.  Over time waves and sand tumbled the chunks of slag and a polished sometimes pitted stone was formed.  These are becoming hard to find, but Pengi and I were able to find 5 stones.

Sunset in Leland