Wisconsin

From Lanesboro, MN we headed to Wauconda, IL to stay at Bob's aunt Florence's house. We traveled down the Mississippi and over to Wauconda in stifling heat. While I was reading in bed, I heard all these sirens go off and wondered whether they were tornado warnings; they were. We headed to the basement to wait out the tornado watch, watching television until 11 p.m. No tornadoes or high wind occured. We then headed north to Manitowoc, WI, going through the Kettle Moraine State Forest. The Wisconsin glacier, the last of the glaciers, came down as far as Indiana about 10,000 years ago. The Kettle Moraine area had all sorts of glacial features: kettles (potholes caused when a piece of the glacier was covered with dirt and the ice slowly melted causing a subsidence), teardrop shaped hills caused by the glacier moving forward and pushing rocks, domes caused either by rockfalls at the forward edge of retreating glaciers or by deep crevices down which water and rocks poured, and other interesting features. We stopped at Mauthe Lake to have lunch in a dog picnic area and then headed for a walk around the lake. We only made it half way before we were stopped by deep water over the trail caused from all the rain in the area. We continued to Manitowoc and a state campground on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was extremely buggy due to all the rain. After dinner we headed for the beach to walk and get away from the mosquitoes. There is an active Coast Guard lighthouse (an old floating lighthouse from Chicago).

The sunset was beautiful. Darwin was chasing his disc until it was so dark he couldn't see it any more. The moon was almost full and was over Lake Michigan.

The next morning I took Bob to a disc golf course on the University of Wisconsin Manitowoc campus. He had tried to play the course the previous afternoon, but it prohibited dogs and he took Darwin until someone told him he could be given a $181 ticket. I went to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, a wonderful museum. Manitowoc was a serious ship-building area for many years. During WWI the builders built many boats. In WWII one of the builders was asked to build submarines. It retooled and during the war 28 submarines were built there. They would be side-launched into Lake Michigan and their crews would test them in Lake Michigan. Submariners (2% of the total Navy and comprised of volunteers only) would learn their skills on their assigned sub, which they would sail to Chicago where the sub was placed on a drydock barge, taken down the Mississippi to New Orleans where it would be armed, and sailed through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. Four of the subs were sunk during WWII. The museum has a wonderful exhibit of boats built in Wisconsin (many of them wood), models, an exhibit on the car ferries and on the Great Lakes fisheries. Twin Rivers, just north of Manitowoc, was a center of the fishing industry which crashed due to over-fishing.

We had reservations on the S.S. Badger, the last coal-powered steam car ferry on Lake Michigan. Car ferries were not built for automobiles, but were built to carry rail cars. Before they existed, freight would be off-loaded from rail cars onto steamers and then re-loaded onto rail cars. The car ferries could carry up to 24 rail cars for the 4 hour trip. Now the coal is delivered in ground form and is further pulverized before being forced into the boilers. It was a beautiful day for a crossing. Earlier in the 20th century the car ferries ran year round (partly because the railroads didn't own their own track through Chicago and it was very expensive to move cars through Chicago). During the winter, the crossings were difficult. The car ferries were designed to work partly as ice breakers. If the ice was less than 10' thick the front of the ferry was designed to ride over the ice and crush it. If it was thicker, the ferry would back through the ice using its screw to develop a wash of water that would rise over the ice and crush it. If a ferry had to back most of the way across it could take up to 24 hours. There were so many ferries that they developed routes through the ice where the ice was thinner. At times Lake Michigan was totally frozen over and the frigid weather caused a huge build-up of ice on the ships.