The professor is back!

Happy almost Halloween!

New Trail

October is really flying by. A few weeks ago, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday by walking around downtown Houghton and admiring the changing colors. 

And now, not only have most of the leaves disappeared from the trees, but that birdbath pictured above has been stored away for the winter. 

Later that early-October week, we headed to NMU for a conference. It's been over four years since we've driven the stretch of 41 between Marquette and Houghton. I forgot how pretty it was. 

Today, a day of 45-mile-per-hour winds, I decided to bike the path that goes along the Keweenaw waterway.  

So very true. 

Of course I started with a doughnut and coffee at the bakery on the water.  The Isle Royale ferry was docked across the street, reminding us we still need to visit that island park in Lake Superior. 

The waterway cuts across the peninsula and turns into Portage lake before ending up at the Keweenaw Bay on Lake Superior. Let's be honest, I can't really figure out what's what. Apparently there's the Portage Canal, Portage Lake, Portage Lake Canal, The Keweenaw Waterway, etc. It's obviously what part is Portage Lake, but I haven't found a map to point the rest out yet.  

I'll just call it the waterway. So, there's the ski hill on the waterway.  

Just leaving downtown on the trail I noticed that Houghton seems to be very excited about the new season.

The bike trail is nice, especially when it's covered with leaves and the 45-mile-per-hour winds are pushing you along.

Eventually it turns to gravel, and even farther down, it gets a little more narrow than I would like. That's when I turned around. 

Here are some other shots:

A nearby nature center has a boardwalk over this river. 

Portage Lake and a leafless skyline.

After turning around, this fallen tree appeared in my path! 

Once I got back into town and before biking into the wind and up the giant hill our house is on, I took a break on Michigan Tech's campus. They've been preserving their leaves somehow.

Joe's home from the woods now, and he's finally starting to feel better after days with strep throat. Time to make dinner and tell each other about our days: luckily escaping a falling tree, walking my bike uphill because it was stuck in seventh gear, and for Joe, I'm sure there were a few windblown-wildlife sightings on the way to his tree stand. 

Saturday Morning

Another week of classes has sped by, and we're finally getting settled.

Tulip bulbs are planted. Things are hung on walls. Licences with terrible photos have come in the mail. We bought a rake.

It's 40 and rainy this weekend, so instead of my Saturday morning ritual of eating a doughnut and reading on the canal, I'm watching traffic pass the wet courtyard of a local coffee shop.

Next week, I'll try to get as many free-birthday meals as possible, we'll drive to Marquette for a two-day conference, and then four family members come up for the weekend. 

It will be great to see Marquette again, but Houghton is treating us well. Most days at work, I sit at my desk after class and feel so, so happy with my job and our new home town. The only thing it's missing is all our friends and family to share it with. As we've learned, it's hard to get all three of these things all at once, so for now, two of the three is pretty good. Maybe if I post enough pictures of an expansive Lake Superior, of morning steam rising off the canal, of the steep, tree-lined hills that hover over downtown, I'll convince everyone to join us. 

Canal Trip

Okay, you are about to be overtaken with photos. This weekend, we explored our surroundings. Saturday, we followed the Portage Canal west from Houghton until it emptied into Lake Superior. 

I've decided to call it Pebble Beach. Can you tell why?

After that, we drove back to Houghton, which included passing the blue door of the Christian Science reading room...

 ...crossed the bridge to Hancock, 

climbed the hill to check out the view of Houghton, 

and followed the canal west to Lake Superior again. 

For dinner, we ate fried whitefish on the hill that is Hancock. Today, we went out to Joe's hunting grounds. 

While he hung tree stands and cut down branches, I lured in chipmunks with freshly fallen acorns.

Target practice. Can you see the arrow?

More of the view:

Tomorrow it's back to school, where I remind my students what a beautiful place they live in. 

We finally figured out where Cedric disappeared to all summer. Click here for more details. 

Inside Copper Country

My dad came up a couple weekends ago, and much to my dismay, he wanted to take a tour of the Quincy mine, an out-of-use copper mine that at one time in the 1860s was producing the most amount of copper in the country.



I had no interest in going underground, but I sucked it up and humored our guest. Luckily, it turned out we weren't going to be lowered into a shaft from above. Instead, they took us down a track along a very large hill, and we entered an old shaft through the side.

It was 41 degrees inside the mine, so they gave us jackets to stay warm (and hardhats to stay safe).



As they pulled us through the cave-like entrance, one of the first things we saw was a classroom carved into the mine. For a while, Michigan Tech students had classes here.

At one point the tour guide turned out the lights.

No thanks.

We walked inside an old mining house.

Happy to be back above ground.