With full bellies from getting some lunch after visiting Tahquamenon Falls, we headed North out of Paradise, MI towards Whitefish Point.
The distance from Paradise to Whitefish point isn't that great, but the road is narrow with only two lanes and a speed limit around forty five miles and hour. That means it takes a good half hour or so to get all the way to the tip of the point.
Once there, you will find yourself at a couple of rather large parking lots (which were packed full on this day) and a view like the one above to your left.
Whitefish Point is home to several key attractions. There is a bird observatory that I have never visited on the point, as well as the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and the Whitefish Point Lighthouse.
If it has been up to me, I probably would have skipped this stop because I have seen it many times before. The kids had seen something about it online and really wanted to go, so we of course complied!
As you can see, they have the whole area setup like a small maritime village. There are three buildings that you are able to enter and walk through besides the museum. I will cover those in a little bit.
The first stop we made was the actual Shipwreck Museum. With a cost of $13 per adult to get in, it isn't a cheap stop, but this gives you access to all of the buildings on the site which in the end probably makes it worth it.
Did I mention this place was packed? They did their best to encourage social distancing, but there were far too many people in the museum to really be able to keep a six foot barrier at all times.
My favorite part of the museum are the lighthouse lenses that they have on display. The one in this picture is a small one compared to the first thing you see when you enter the display area.
Talk about impressive, this thing is front and center as you walk in and it really holds your attention the whole way around the room. The room itself is fairly small with displays covering the perimeter walls. Basically they take a small section of the wall and devote it to a single shipwreck.
Informational signs on the wall tell you about the ship and the sad story of how it went down. Below that information on the wall, they have displayed items that they recovered from the aforementioned shipwreck.
This is another thing you see when you first enter the museum if you can pry your eyes down from the huge lens a little bit. It is the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald, probably the most famous shipwreck that has ever taken place on Lake Superior. It was memorialized by the Gordon Lightfoot song "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".
Now I will share some displays that caught my eye from around the room...
They also have a small area back in the one corner that recreates an actual dive scene.
Now some more pictures from inside the museum...
Finally, they leave you with a relatively large scale model of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I couldn't get a picture of the whole thing because there were too many people in the way.
The other structures you can enter are pretty typical for this type of place. One is the boat house that celebrates the United States Life-Saving Service which gave birth to the modern day Coast Guard.
The other is the lighthouse keepers quarters. Here are some pictures from that...
They have some wax statues of people in the lightkeepers house that are pretty creepy. The little girl standing and looking out the one window would give anyone the chills who shined a light in there on a dark night.
I didn't take any pictures for fear some kind of spirit might follow me home! We skipped visiting the gift shop and instead headed to the boardwalk that leads out to the tip of the point.
I thought I got a better shot than this, but apparently not. It appeared that about half of the people who where parked in the parking lot were actually just enjoying a nice day at the beach. It was pretty crowded despite how it looks in this particular photo.