percolate & fabricate: Vacation! Part 2

Monday (18) : After staying in a place that made me feel as if the Minnesota Chainsaw Massacre was going to take place Sunday night I was more than ready to hit the road Monday morning. It was G's birthday so he got to pick what we were going to do for the day and we decided to head back north and get some hiking done. I had gone to Gooseberry Falls on my first trip to Duluth so I made sure to scout out the place as an option for "Birthday Day" (apparently G doesn't celebrate for a solid month like two gals I know!). I also had remembered when G and I were first talking that he said his perfect day was hiking, having a picnic then sitting on the beach with a couple of drinks ... in Hawaii, well I think Lake Superior was pretty close and I'm being serious! It was an amazing day full of beautiful views and the both of us saying, "Wow, God is pretty great, look at this!" a lot. We stopped back in Two Harbors and got a picnic lunch packed. This is where I am a hiking novice and even though we both packed small backpacks we needed lots of fluid for the hot day so needless to say the 3 bottles of water and 2 Gatorades in combination with the meat, crackers, cheese & granola bars was a little heavy! But we made it work.

While we were in MN the government was on shut-down so technically all of the state parks were closed, but we were willing to risk it and by the time we arrived at the falls we were parked on the side of the road with lots of other vehicles so we weren't alone. The rest of the day we hiked the falls, ate our picnic lunch on the trail and made our way down to Lake Superior. I think it was wonderful that the park was technically closed because we pretty much felt alone the entire hike to Fifth Falls which was awesome. We also managed to hike awhile in the Split Rock Lighthouse area and wound up on the rock shore of the lake completely alone and you couldn't even tell where the lake and the sky met. We were both pretty speechless. I took G out for dinner at our lodge's restaurant that night and we sat on a great deck on the lake for a couple hours eating great food, drinking and laughing, it was a pretty perfect day.

Gooseberry Falls