When I was a kid, my family used to do a fair deal of camping. We started in a tent, then traded that for a pop up before finally graduating to hard side campers. We had a little 18 foot or so travel trailer that we took to just about every state East of the Mississippi river.

Many of our trips kept us inside the state of Michigan, but across the bridge into the Upper Peninsula (UP).

My wife did a fair amount of camping as a child too, but most of their trips kept them closer to home. Due to that fact, there was very little of the UP that my wife had seen until she met me.

To rectify that situation, I made the decision to work our way across the UP through a series of trips each year. The first year took us to the Sault Ste. Marie area and the second year took us to the Manistique region of the UP. Last year we visited Marquette and finally this year we traveled to the Keweenaw Peninsula area of Michigan.

If you check out this post from yesterday, you will see that we made Baraga, MI our home base for this trip. I picked Baraga for a couple of reasons:

It gave us not much more than an hour drive to each of the locations that we had planned to visit on our trip.
They had recently installed full hook up sites at the camp ground. The meant we could use the facilities in our trailer (bathroom and shower) which would reduce our exposure to the public restrooms. It seemed like the smart move with all the pandemic stuff going on.

It had been close to 30 years since I had been to this part of the state, so I was just as excited as Hive account@mrsbozz about getting out and exploring. After a long day of travel on Saturday, we started our journey early Sunday morning up Highway 41 into the Keweenaw Peninsula.

It is a beautiful drive up the coast of the bay and before we knew it, we were heading into Houghton, MI.

As you can see from the sign, Houghton is the birthplace of professional hockey. It is also home to Michigan Technical University (MTU) and basically the gateway to the rest of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Here are some photos my wife took from the truck of the MTU campus:

My wife and I had some big plans for this day, the primary focus being a mine tour (which I will talk about tomorrow). We had some time to kill while we were waiting for that to start, so we decided to take a drive down to the canal which separates the lower half of the peninsula from the upper.

What you see on the other side of the channel is Hancock, MI. The sister cities of Houghton and Hancock rest on either side of the channel. I mentioned that Houghton was sort of the gateway to the rest of the peninsula and that is because of the fact that the bridge you see in the opening is the only auto route across the channel. At no other point in the Keweenaw Peninsula can you drive a car across the channel.

With our reserved time for our mine tour getting closer, we made our way across the bridge and into Hancock, MI.

We stopped at this roadside park on our way to our next destination. It was actually a pretty disappointing stop.

I am guessing back in the day it was probably pretty impressive. The problem now is that so many trees have grown in at the base of the hill that you can no longer see the channel. Perhaps that isn't the case in the Fall/Winter, but in the middle of Summer the view is non-existent.

Besides some useful information, there isn't much else to see here.