Iron Range vacation was great

We never did see Hibbing High School or swim in an ore pit, but otherwise everything went remarkably as planned, including the plan to leave the second half of the trip UNplanned. We spent most of two days on the beach at McCarthy Beach State Park, which is just as awesome a state park as I remembered. We successfully activated the backup plan for the day that it rained all day, finally getting a chance to see a tourist attraction I had been trying to get to for umpteen years. And the rest of the time we biked. The Mesabi Trail is spectacular! I intend to get back up there earlier next year, when it is still warm enough to swim in a pit lake, and see some more of it.

However, if vacations are supposed to leave you refreshed and invigorated, I guess it was a failure. Before we left town I had plans to accomplish all sorts of household projects when we got back, but instead I just fiddled around with online pictures, experimented with accessories for my new phone, started a document (with pictures!) to catalog my bike trips, and otherwise fiddled away the entire long weekend that was left over after the trip. I finally finished unpacking my suitcase today.

Since I have all these pictures I think I'll post them in a series of daily logs, thus allowing me to continue vacationing retroactively for the rest of the weekend. I'll be nice and put the details behind cuts. Not only that, I decided it was time to start keeping actual physical photo albums again and printed out some of my favorite pictures. I'm just going to put them in the same old crappy magnetic page albums I've always used, even though I now realize how bad they are for prints. The originals are digital anyway, so it really doesn't matter very much, does it?

What I did on my vacation: Day 1

Took Friday off from work just to pack. It was complicated, as we needed to carry clothing for temperatures that could be anywhere from low 40's to low 90's, bedding and food for one night camping out, 2 bikes, and an excess of float toys that I had acquired on the Internets in an orgy of pre-vacation ordering. We got everything into the minivan somehow and headed out on Saturday shortly before noon. Our destination was Virginia, where I had reserved a room in the AmericInn at a highly inflated price. It was Labor Day weekend, after all; I was just lucky to find a hotel with rooms available at all. We stopped about halfway to bike a short stretch of the Albert Munger trail between Finlayson and Rutledge. The southern part of this long trail is not very exciting, running mostly through cornfields, so we deliberately picked a section that had a few hills to make it more scenic. Perhaps that was a little too ambitious, given the heat and all. It was pleasant but uncomfortably hot, and not exciting enough that I even felt moved to take any pictures.

We arrived in Virginia at about 5pm, checked in to the hotel and headed off on a sunset ride to Mountain Iron, 4.5 miles away. That was a beautiful ride, in the cool of the evening. Mountain Iron is a fiercely proud little town, in a region where every town seems to be proud of something. In their case they are perpetually celebrating the fact that they were the first mining town on the Mesabi Range. We finished up the evening with a pleasantly greasy meal at the "Sawmill Saloon and Eatery, an Iron Range Tradition" and a soak in the hotel hot tub. All round, a very fine first day.

( pictures behind the cut, featuring the adorable town of Mountain Iron )