Midwest Guest

Photo Friday: Opa! Fest recap

We revisit Opa! Fest this week for a recap of last weekend’s great celebration of Greek food, culture, dancing and singing at the beautiful St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Troy, Michigan.

We dropped by the festival Saturday for an early lunch of hot and cold dolmathes (stuffed grape leaves), sausage, feta cheese and kalamata olives.

The bakery counter was our next stop, where an enthusiastic young saleslady helped us choose some cookies to take home with us. When a kid behind the cookie counter immediately says “these are my favorites!” as I ask for suggestions—I listen! And she did a nice job of helping us select some yummy take-home treats.

We returned later that evening to catch a dynamite show from guitar great, Pavlo. The Toronto-based musician and his band brought a full menu of Mediterranean-style of music and dance to the Opa! Fest stage—a bill familiar to many U.S. fans because of Pavlo’s popular PBS television special “Mediterranean Nights” filmed early last year in Dearborn Michigan’s Ford Community & Performing Arts Center. The show aired multiple times on PBS stations, including Detroit’s public television station WTVS, last year.

I loved the band’s use of traditional and unusual (at least to me) instruments like the Afro-Peruvian box drum called a cajόn played by percussionist Gino Mirizio. The band’s easy onstage camaraderie carried the show along smoothly as the spotlight alternated among band members and their dancers came onstage for a couple of traditional salsa and belly dancing numbers.

Fun moments included an instrumental “duel” between guitarist Pavlo and bouzouki player, George Vasilakos, who answered Pavlo’s behind-the-back guitar playing with a short interlude of playing his bouzouki with his teeth—a la Jimi Hendrix.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

The “Incident” in Ely, Minnesota

I pushed a cart loaded with bottled water along an aisle in the small grocery store. Stopping, I reached toward a shelf of candles when the store suddenly went dark!

Welcome to Ely, Minnesota and the aftermath of the area’s infamous 1999 “incident”.

We’d traveled to northern Minnesota to spend close to a week in a quiet bed and breakfast on Farm Lake at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a few miles outside of Ely.

We first stopped at Piragis, an outfitter in town where we’d reserved two canoes for the week’s stay.

It looked like rain as we picked up our canoes and strapped them to the top of our SUV for the short drive to the Blue Heron Bed & Breakfast.

We took off from Piragis and quickly found ourselves in the middle of a raging rainstorm, accompanied by straight line winds that threatened to blow our rented boats away into the wilderness!

The boats seemed to pull in every direction. Tim stopped and hopped out of our Mountaineer to make sure the boats were secure, and got completely drenched in less than a few minutes outside of the car.

The storm seemed pretty much over by the time we reached our B&B.

The B&B owner rejoiced when she saw us make it up her long driveway because that meant she wouldn’t have to get her chain saw out to clear the drive of fallen trees that night.

By the time we’d unloaded the boats and visited the grocery store in town, our B&B lost power. The candles and bottled water we purchased came in handy until the B&B's power came back on the next day.

The rest of our trip turned out relaxing and relatively unaffected by the storm’s effects.

Other Ely residents and visitors weren’t so fortunate.

The infamous Fourth of July Blowdown in 1999 fell 600 square miles of forest and caused millions of dollars of in damage in northern Minnesota alone.

The storm, also known as the Boundary Waters-Canadian Derecho, lasted 22 hours and roiled over 1,300 miles. Records show that any other storm going back to the early 18^th century paled in comparison with the Fourth of July Blowdown in terms of size and force. More than 40 percent of the total BWCAW felt the storm’s effects, with some areas losing every mature tree to the winds that reached as much as 80 to 100 miles per hour.

We heard stories throughout the week of our visit about groups of chain-saw wielding neighbors and volunteers clearing not only driveways, but paths to canoeists stranded (and some even injured) deep in the wilderness and unable to paddle or portage out.

Some area residents and businesses waited several days for power to come back on.

I remember eating at a nearby restaurant where staff improvised with a few generator-powered appliances and grills to feed hungry guests, while other guests at a nearby resort “roughed it” by convincing their hosts to let them plug their blenders into a generator long enough to mix a few batches of margaritas!

The day after the storm, a morning mist floated over glass-like Farm Lake as we launched our canoes past the wild rice near the shore for a quiet paddle.

I snapped a few photos of the destruction we saw throughout our visit, with fields of towering trees snapped off like matchsticks about 15 feet high and crews working to clear fallen timber from the roads.

Short as the storm seemed to us at the time, the aftermath of the 1999 Blowdown created long-lasting and detrimental effects on the area’s environment. Scientists, naturalists and other researchers continue to debate those effects today as the event’s tenth anniversary approaches.

Changes in the environment resulted in an especially increased risk for wildfires. One notable event occurred in July of 2006, when a lightning strike resulted in a wildfire burning 367,000 acres of the 1999 Blowdown area—or 3 percent of the total 1.1 million acres of BWCAW.

We wondered about the area’s recovery from the storm and planned a visit to Ely this summer. Unfortunately, the personal economic storm we’re weathering changed our plans.

We hope to visit Ely in the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, we continue to wonder how the forests so badly damaged then appear now and wish the best for the residents of the area as they continue to address the concerns caused by “the incident”.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Michigan Sports Hall of Fame to lose hall home

We’ve known about a series of brass plaques and faded photographs honoring Michigan sports legends that line a couple of largely deserted hallways in Detroit’s Cobo Hall for quite some time.

I took my camera to the North American International Auto Show earlier this year, and I took a detour to wander down the halls housing the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame (MSHOF) plaques on the way back to the parking lot from the auto show.

I snapped a few shots of the forlorn hallways, but the garish florescent lighting and faded posters didn’t present an exciting photo opportunity.

Maybe it’s fortunate that I did snap those photos, though, as the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame’s plaques may soon no longer call Cobo Center their home. Plans call for the removal of the plaques whenever the convention center finally undergoes badly needed renovations.

Each two-foot-by-two-foot plaque weighs nearly 50 pounds. The halls housing the plaques since 1964 cannot hold all 270 of the organization’s honoree plaques, and about 50 of them are already in storage.

MSHOF officials announced plans to offer the plaques to collectors at auction in order to finance their removal and create a more permanent and fully interactive shrine to Michigan sports heroes.

Finances create a challenge for the organization as it continues to seek a 30,000-square-foot home in downtown Detroit to house the hall. The group opted to discontinue creating plaques for new hall of fame inductees more than a year ago to concentrate on raising money for a modern sports shrine with sound, video and other interactive elements.

Finances also forced the MSHOF to indefinitely postpone their February 2009 dinner honoring 2008 MSHOF inductees that included: Flint Southwestern and University of Michigan football and baseball star Rich Leach; Detroit Red Wings co-owner and youth sports supporter Marian Ilitch; owner of the NHL Carolina Hurricanes and Junior Major Plymouth (MI) Whalers hockey teams Peter Karmanos; and NASCAR team owner Jack Roush. 

The group announced the planned plaque auction for June 15 of this year, only to postpone the proposed sale when state officials discovered that the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame’s state license to solicit charitable donations and federal financial disclosure paperwork were not up-to-date.   

Critics questioned the planned auction and wondered if the MSHOF could continue to exist without definite plans for a physical location.

The MSHOF reportedly owes its genesis to the brain behind annual Michigan Week, which is a unified campaign to promote tourism in the state. Don Weeks, the Michigan Economic Development director who pitched Michigan Week to the state government in 1954, came up with the idea for a Michigan Sports Hall of Fame that same year with George Alderton, the sports editor of the Lansing State Journal. The two men came up the idea to honor Michigan sports figures and personalities during a conversation at a barbershop and passed it along to friends at Michigan State University.

Today, notices announcing the MSHOF postponed induction dinner and delayed auction remain on the group’s Web site, and the link for the MSHOF 2009 mobile exhibit doesn’t work.

Michigan, and Detroit in particular, has a great sports tradition. People here are passionate about their sports teams. When our teams and heroes do well, that acts as a powerful force to unite the state in pride and enjoyment—especially in tough times.

It’s sad to see the plaques languish while their fate hinges on legal paperwork and a sorry economic climate. We can only wonder what happens, or doesn’t happen, next.

© Dominique King 2009

Photo Friday

Regular readers at Midwest Guest know that we have memberships to The Henry Ford. We enjoy visiting the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, an 80-acre site with 83 historic structures recreating various locations and eras throughout American history.

Greenfield Village regularly offers rides on a train with a 19^th-century steam engine, but for a few days each year, Thomas the Tank Engine visits the village and travels the tracks to give visitors rides during a Day out with Thomas.

Thomas draws a lot of families to visit the village and wait for their chance to ride the train pulled by the cheerful blue engine.

We found that visiting the village when Thomas is in town usually means that once you get past the crowd at the train station, the rest of the village is less crowded.

Since our goal with visiting the village is usually taking photos, less crowded is good—and I had a couple of chances to catch a few shots of Thomas during his travels around Greenfield Village during one recent visit.

You can barely spot Thomas in the distance in the first shot, as I caught him going past the mid-1800-vintage Susquehanna Plantation from the tidewater region of Maryland.

The subsequent shots show Thomas coming and going past us as the little engine pulls cars full of passengers.

We enjoy our memberships at The Henry Ford and also have memberships for several other museums and cultural institutions in our area. We find that having memberships encourages us to visit our local museums more frequently during the year, even as we help support the places we love as they struggle in a challenging economy.

Please consider supporting your local museums, zoos, historic sites and other great places in your local area by purchasing memberships and visiting.

You’ll be glad you did!

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009

Bishop Baraga: the Snowshoe Priest

Gripping a seven-foot cross in one hand, and a pair of 26-foot-long snowshoes in the other, the four-ton copper statue of Bishop Baraga looked a little incongruous standing in a park on the sunny September day we last visited him.

Standing tall atop a small steel pouf of cloud supported by five wooden arches, the statue adopts what may seem to be a modestly devout posture with its bowed head when viewed from a distance. A closer look, though, reveals some of the steely resolve that probably sustained the priest as he traveled the frozen Upper Peninsula in the coldest part of winter.

Father Baraga, born in 1797 in Slovenia, originally studied law and graduated from law school in 1821. He opted to enter the priesthood, however, and began his missionary work in America after arriving in the western Great Lakes region in 1830.

Baraga worked primarily among Native Americans with the intent of spreading the Catholic faith, establishing five missions in the region—represented by the five arches supporting the statue.

Father Baraga established the last of those missions at the village of L’Anse, and the site of an earlier Jesuit mission during the 1600s.

The priest became the first bishop of the Upper Peninsula in 1853.

Bishop Baraga reportedly enjoyed a life of upper-class comfort in Europe, which makes later stories of long treks through the snowy UP to complete his circuit of far-flung churches to minister to native peoples and small communities of copper miners even more amazing. He continued his long snowshoe treks into his sixties, writing about traveling over 700 miles through some snowy winters.

Bishop Baraga gained a reputation as a kind and compassionate man who loved the native people and supported their desire to retain their culture and tried to help protect them from relocation efforts.

Bishop Baraga learned the native languages and the prolific author developed a written language for them so he could write grammar, dictionaries and prayer books for native readers. As a child, he studied in a variety of languages that included French, German, Latin and Greek—none of those languages his native Slovenian, which may explain his multilingual fluency.

His health deteriorated over the last decade of his life as he went deaf and suffered several strokes. One source says the statue’s stern expression is due to the fact that the Bishop had already suffered a stroke and couldn’t smile by the time of the statue’s creation.

Bishop Baraga died at Marquette, Michigan in 1868.

Bishop Baraga namesakes in the Upper Peninsula include a village, county and a state park.

The Bishop Baraga Association raised money to build the Shrine in the 1960s on donated land and continues to collect donations to help operate and maintain the shrine, which attracts an average of 100,000 visitors each year.

The outdoor shrine, on US-41 and a mile west of the turn to downtown L’Anse, is always open to visitors.

Check the Web for hours at the small shop on site selling religious books, gift and snacks—reopened since our last visit.

Benches around the park and a view of Keweenaw Bay from a high bluff make it a great place to spend a little quiet time.

The two-acre park setting of the Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest was deserted and peaceful during our visit, leaving us free to walk around the statue and snap some great photos against the clear, blue sky.

© Dominique King 2009

Wagner Falls and Munising: Gateway to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has many beautiful waterfalls, and Wagner Falls near Munising is one of my favorite falls.

Alger County is home to 17 waterfalls, ranging from small unnamed falls to much larger falls along the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Some Alger waterfalls, like Chapel Falls, are a long walk in from a trailhead.

Some of Alger’s waterfalls are quite readily visible, although the roadside Alger Falls on M-28 at the M-94 junction is a little tricky to access because of its location along a busy highway with little parking along the road’s shoulder.

Once you’re at Alger Falls, the access point for Wagner Falls is about a ¼ mile away.

Wagner Falls is a classic cascade and easily accessible via a half-mile long boardwalk trail leading in from a small parking area on M-94 and just off M-28.

There are some staircases along the walk to Wagner Falls, but short length of the walk and the level surfaces of some of the wider spots in the trail make it easier to pack in a tripod if you want to spend a little time and experiment with slower shutter speeds while taking photos of the falls.

One of my favorite memories of visiting Wagner Falls is a time we spent nearly an hour at the falls with no other visitors around. The end of the trail had a few benches, which made it a nice place to just sit, meditate and listen to the roar of the waterfalls.

The Munising area is also home to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, the Hiawatha National Forest, the Alger Underwater Preserve where divers can view remains of over a dozen shipwrecks and Grand Island National Recreation Area.

While we were able to stop by Wagner Falls and Alger Falls the last time we visited the Upper Peninsula, it’s been quite a few years since we’ve been able to see a lot of other attractions around the area.

We especially enjoyed traveling the nearly 70 miles of H-58 from Munising through large swaths of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, past the access point for the isolated Au Sable Point Lighthouse, through Grand Marais into more forests in Luce County. The road, which is the main access for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, was mostly gravel or sand when we last drove it at least five years ago. Driving the road in some sections was a bit of an adventure as the sandy soil threatened so slide off into Lake Superior at a few points, but the lightly traveled road offered a beautiful view of some of the most wild and isolated areas in the eastern Upper Peninsula.

We’ve watched anxiously from afar as a huge paving project along this route continues through at least 2010. It will probably be a couple of years before we can drive H-58 again, so I’m very curious to see the finished road. I also wonder how much of the sense of adventure and closeness to nature along H-58 will remain at the paving project’s completion.

© Dominique King 2009

Photo Friday

Opa!

That word often signals the arrival of your order of flaming cheese at the local Coney, but here in the Detroit area, it signals the arrival of the largest ongoing festival celebrating Greek art, song, dance and culture in our metropolitan area.

We’ve trekked up to St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in suburban Troy each year for the annual Opa! Fest after I initially discovered the event by spotting a roadside sign. This year’s Opa! Fest takes place June 26-28.

Great Greek food, prepared by an army of elderly Greek ladies and their assistants, is on the menu—but only if you arrive early enough in the day before the food runs low! The bakery stand is so popular with folks stocking up on homemade pastries and crusty bread to take home that it’s best to make your purchases early, take them home and come back to the festival later in the day to enjoy the entertainment.

Make time to check out the beautiful church and unique religious art at St. Nicholas, which is open for visitors wanting to spend a little quiet time during the hectic festival.

Kids’ dance groups usually start off each day’s program. The youngest dancers go first, and they often stick around to watch as the progressively older and more skilled dancers follow them onstage.

Opa! Fest usually schedules plenty of local talent to entertain the crowds, but organizers occasionally book a bigger name act.

Imagine being able to say you saw a Tony-award nominee perform at the festival in the St. Nicholas parking lot! Two years ago, we saw Constantine Maroulis, the sixth-place finalist from the fourth season of American Idol and current star of the Broadway smash Rock of Ages on the Opa! Fest stage.

Find out more about this year's event by reading my recent article about Opa! Fest at The Urbane Life.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009

Brockway Mountain Drive offers birds-eye view of Keweenaw

Brockway Mountain Drive offers stunning picture-postcard views of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula and, on a clear day, you might even catch a glimpse of the wild and remote Isle Royale National Park nearly 50 miles distant.

We last drove the road during an early September visit, just ahead of the fall color season in Michigan’s northernmost reaches, so we saw the beginnings of a kiss of autumn color as we traveled the road. I can only imagine how glorious these views must look at the height of fall color a week or so later into the season.

Brockway Mountain Drive is the highest scenic roadway between the Rockies and the Alleghenies, with its highest point hitting 1,328 feet above sea level (or 726 feet above Lake Superior’s surface).

The approximately 9-mile drive is just a short distance outside of Copper Harbor, the small town at the very tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, but it can seem miles away from anywhere when you’re atop the mountain.

While the numbers and the views are impressive, I’m always more fascinated by the difficult work and engineering that must have gone into what is one of northern Michigan’s legacies from the Great Depression in the 1930s.

With jobs in short supply during the dark days of the Depression, the government’s Works Project Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps created projects like Brockway Mountain Drive to provide employment for workers. Unemployment was particularly acute in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with massive job losses among the area’s copper miners. The value of the project went well beyond immediate employment as we continue to enjoy the workers’ efforts more than 70 years later.

The project employed up to 300 workers for wages of twenty-five cents per hour. Imagine those workers cutting a road along the steep cliff on the Keweenaw Fault!

Keep an eye out for vintage-1930s stone walls along the route and be sure to visit the Skytop Inn, a small gift shop atop the Brockway Mountain Summit originally established in 1934.

The road offers plenty of scenic turnouts to stop and enjoy the view, as well as places to walk and learn about the mountain’s rich ecosystem. Those visiting in early June can enjoy the peak season for many of Brockway Mountain’s more than 700 wildflower varieties, many unique to this particular area.

There is no electricity atop the mountain, making the trip a must-do for astronomy buffs seeking the unadulterated darkness of the night sky that’s ideal for stargazing or maybe even seeing the Northern Lights.

Brockway Mountain Drive opens in spring when the road is clear of the Keweenaw’s legendary accumulation of winter snow and closes to cars in late fall, when it becomes a snowmobile trail.

We’ve found the drive worth taking even on the haziest and windiest of days—and it can get plenty windy atop Brockway! The haze may give your photos more of a vintage Polaroid look, and feeling the strong winds may give you even more of an appreciation for those hard-working former miners who carved this pathway so long ago that we may enjoy some of Michigan’s most beautiful vistas today.

© Dominique King

Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse new to us

Going “Up North” as often as we do, we don’t feel we have to panic when our timing isn’t right to see a particular thing at a particular time. We figure that leaves something new (to us) to see during a future visit.

And so, that was the case after our most recent visit to Mackinaw City.

We arrived at the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse, located at the tip of Michigan’s mitt near downtown Mackinaw City, just as the light tower closed for the day. We didn’t get to tour the inside of the lighthouse, climb the tower or shop in the gift store that day, but we were able to take a few photos of the lighthouse and enjoy the great view of the Mackinac Bridge from the grounds.

This particular lighthouse always reminds me a bit of a castle, with its light-caramel colored brick and stately tower with relief detailing. An expansive lawn and spectacular view of the Straits of Mackinac adds to the feeling of stepping back in time to visit an elegant Victorian estate.

Fog signals began operating at the site in 1890, and the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse saw completion in 1892. The lighthouse illuminated the way for traffic through the Straits until 1957, when the then-new and brightly-lit Mackinac Bridge made the lighthouse unnecessary as a navigational aid.

Purchased by the Mackinac Island State Park Commission in 1960, the lighthouse served as a gallery from 1972 through 1990. Efforts to restore the light to its 1910-era appearance began in 2000, with the lighthouse reopening to the public in 2004.

The Straits was busy area during the 1670s when the French established a mission and a fort near St. Ignace in the Upper Peninsula. A newer fort built in 1714 on the southern side of the Straits in the Lower Peninsula, and near the current lighthouse site, played a key role in the area’s bustling fur trade before coming under British control after the French and Indian War. The Brits eventually moved the fort to Mackinac Island. The island remained a major fur trading center until the 1830s and became a major summer vacation area after the Civil War in the 1860s.

Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse takes its name from the fort’s southern Straits site.

The Mackinac Parks Web site, and my source for the historical information in this post, details the history of the light, its construction, its keepers, its closure and its eventual restoration as an attraction reopened to the public.

The lighthouse grounds existed as a park before the establishment of the lighthouse itself, so part of the keepers’ job always involved greeting park visitors and showing off the light station as long as it didn’t interfere with their work.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, when budget cutbacks forced the closing of the park and the lighthouse to the public. Concerns with deterioration of the brick lighthouse and tower put its future in question, but restoration and reopening of the lighthouse became a priority of the Mackinac State Historic Parks by the latter half of the 1990s. The restored lighthouse tower and keepers’ dwelling reopened to the public in 2004.

Today, touring the lighthouse offers visitors a look at life at the site circa 1910 with period furniture and costumed historical interpreters. Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse is open seven days a week from early May through early September. Check the Web site for the schedule of hours and days the lighthouse opens to visitors. Visitors can pay for admission to just the lighthouse or purchase a package that combines admission costs for several ticketed sites in the Straits area (see Web site for details).

Even though we didn’t get to tour the lighthouse during our last visit, it was the first time we could remember being able to roam the grounds and take photos.

Our visit gave us just enough of a taste for the lighthouse site to whet our appetites for a future visit when we can finally tour inside the lighthouse.

Check out my article Mighty Mac connects Michigan to learn more about the Mackinac Bridge and for an explanation of the spelling discrepancy between “Mackinaw” and Mackinac”

 

© Dominique King 2009

Photo Friday

We have a membership to The Henry Ford in Dearborn Michigan, so we spend quite a lot of time out at the museum throughout the year.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find, given The Henry Ford’s name and connection to the automotive pioneer and founder of the Ford Motor Company, that the museum has an impressive collection of automobiles and exhibits related to the influence of cars on the national life and psyche.

The museum’s “Automobile in American Life” permanent exhibit includes several of our favorite artifacts, like this 1940s roadside diner.

World War II veteran Clovis Lamy ordered a 40-seat diner from the manufacturer after returning home from his Army service. Clovis and his wife, Gertrude, took delivery of the custom car in April 1946 and opened to brisk business in Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Lamy found long hours as a diner owner meant less time with his family, so he sold the diner in 1950.

Customers deserted downtown diner cars for suburban chains and fast-food restaurants by the late 1950s.

The Henry Ford searched for such a diner as the 1980s arrived and, by 1984, an historian spotted a sale listing for Lamy’s now-dilapidated original diner car.

The museum purchased the diner and restored it to include it as a prominent piece of the collection.

Clovis and Gertrude Lamy visited the museum to view the diner at the 1987 opening of the “Automobile in American Life” exhibit. The Lamys agreed that the diner they so lovingly designed more than 40 years earlier looked like new, and an American Heritage Magazine article said that Clovis wept when he saw his beautifully restored diner at The Henry Ford,

The placement of the diner near a large vintage McDonald’s sign seems a bit ironic, don’t you think?

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

Check out my previous Photo Friday featuring The Henry Ford's McDonald's sign.

© Dominique King 2009