Puerto Rico Rambles: Pictured Rocks

Friday, September 19, 2014

Pictured Rocks

So we've been away for a while. Did anyone wonder why? We were off-island for three weeks visiting, taking care of grandkids and doing some site-seeing. This is going to be a multi-part tale of the trip but not necessarily in chronological order. In fact, the first installment is from the middle of the trip.

(Disclaimer: any friends along the way whom we did not see, we are so sorry. Truly. Except for the first week, which was locked in, we deliberately kept things flexible. Translation? Some visits got in, some didn't. We enjoyed every one of the visits we made and sorely miss the ones we missed.)

So where do people who live on a tropical island go on vacation? Would you believe the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

For those who don't know Michigan, first, it's way up north in the U.S. It has two giant peninsulas in the Great Lakes: the Upper Peninsula and (cleverly) the Lower Peninsula. The two are divided by the Straits of Mackinac (pronounced mack-a-naw). The five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge connects the two halves. Before the Bridge opened in 1957, the only way to get between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas was by ferry or by driving around Lake Michigan through Indiana, up through Chicago, Illinois and Wisconsin. People who live in the Upper Peninsula are called "Yoopers." Those from the Lower Peninsula are called "Trolls" (because they live "under the bridge").

The northern shore of the Upper Peninsula (UP) is defined by Lake Superior, the largest and deepest of the five Great Lakes. That northern edge of Michigan is home to one of the most amazing places on this earth: the Pictured Rocks National Seashore.

For 12 miles of coastline great brightly colored sandstone cliffs rise 200 to 300 feet above Lake Superior. The colors come from minerals dissolved in spring water that seeps through the sandstone and runs down the face of the rock, White is calcium, black manganese, red iron, green copper.

The rocks look like great drip paintings. The colors are everywhere.

The Pictured Rocks are why we came to the UP on this vacation. Nine years ago, on our first vacation to the west side of Puerto Rico, we visited a beach called Punta Borinquen. Elaine's first thoughts her first words were, "It looks like Pictured Rocks in the UP!" I had to admit that even though I lived in Michigan for 25 years, I'd never been to the UP or to Pictured Rocks. This trip was to make up for that deficit.

So here is the cliff at Punta Borinqen: