August 16, 2009, Sunday
The weather was not looking promising as we left home for vacation a little after eight this morning. I couldn't decide where to stop first or even which route to take to our destination Hancock in Michigan’s UP.
I finally made up my mind to go to Agate Falls. It is just off of Hwy 45, on Hwy 28, south of Bruce Crossing. You get to it on a trail from the Joseph E. Oravec roadside park. It is a cute little park, along the middle branch of the Ontonagon River.
From the park, you walk on a paved path, and then a boardwalk for maybe a quarter mile, under the highway and under an old railroad trestle to get there. The trestle is the coolest part. You can’t really get close to the falls; just view it from the observation platform at the end of the trail. But then we crawled up a rabbit path to the trestle, which is now a snowmobile trail. What a view from up there, would probably be even cooler though, if I wasn’t so terrified of heights.
A little ways up the road, Hwy 45 goes through the little village of Rockland. From there we took the Victoria Dam Road four miles to Old Victoria, a mining town from the 1800’s that is being restored. I have always wanted to go there, and didn’t think anything of it when there was a sign on the turn-off that said “Craft Fair Old Victoria today”. We easily found the little spot in the road known as Victoria. There were about four log cabins, a couple sheds, a few ruins, along with 12 or so venders with their canopy tents selling their homemade goods.
I would have been ok with it, because they had some cool homemade crafts and things, but you know how it is when you have your heart set on a cookie dough blizzard and you get a Reese’s pieces blizzard instead? It is just kind of made me sad.
