Played hooky yesterday and convinced She Who Puts Up With Me to put up with all three kids for the day instead. Fired up the plane, and flew up to Grand Marais, MN, with the intent of visiting our place on Bogus Lake.

It has been over a year since my last trip to Grand Marais (twins will do that to you), and unfortunately, when I arrived, the battery in the pickup was compete toast. Fortunately, it got me far enough so I could coast into town (I coasted about three miles--fortunately, it was downhill), then waited several hours before someone could take a look at it and make sure the problem really was the battery and not something far worse.

After all, I don't want Far Worse to happen when I'm ten miles from town in the middle of the woods, instead of at the top of a big hill with the only town for 30 miles at the bottom.

The upshot was that, while I only got to spend an hour or so at Bogus Lake before it got dark, I did get to take some nice pictures in Grand Marais.



This is the view from 9,000 feet of an unknown lake somewhere north of Minneapolis. I love the way the patterns of ice and snow are visible on the surface of the lake. In another month, this will just be an expanse of white.



Ice clinging to the rocks at Artist's Point in Grand Marais (looking northeast). These rocky shorelines are very typical of the North Shore of Lake Superior. These are all ancient lava flows (some of the oldest on the planet), which break off vertically when they erode, leaving gently rounded outcroppings of bedrock with vertical edges. We have a 30-40 foot cliff at one point on our property, and there are places along the North Shore with cliff faces hundreds of feet high.



Taken from the same spot, looking the other direction (southwest). The hills sloping up from the lake are 800-1200 feet high, and are called the Sawtooth Mountains (for obvious reasons). This is one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet (or so I'm told), which is why they're so puny compared to, say, the Rockies.

Despite the problems with the pickup, it was a great day to be Up North. From the air, there was at least 100 miles visibility: I could clearly see the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from over Duluth. Let's hope it's much less than a year before I get to go back.

Believe it or not, for all the years I've been traveling like a maniac for business, this is my first trip to Miami. Every city has something unique about it, and with Miami, there's a certain visual sense. The best word I can think of is "overexposed," in the photographic sense.

The sun is extremely bright by my Minnesota standards. Even in early fall, I think the sun is higher in the sky here than it ever gets in the Twin Cities (astronomy geeks can tell me if I'm right or not). In addition, the architecture tends towards whites and pastels, and the overall effect is like a photograph which is just a little bit (maybe one stop) overexposed. Colors just aren't saturated, with the only exception being the ocean.

The above photo was taken from my hotel room the night I stayed at the Inter-Continental. In keeping with the visual metaphor, the picture is overexposed by 2/3 of a stop; in addition, the tinted glass of the hotel window washes out the greens of the grass in the park.

Some observations about Miami:

1) Everybody, and I mean everybody speaks Spanish. You can tell the non-natives because they only speak English. In Minneapolis, you're more likely to hear Hmong or Somali than Spanish.

2) It is very hot, and very humid. Even my VP of Marketing, who is always complaining about being too cold, was complaining about the heat. When I took my camera outside, I couldn't use it because the lens had fogged up. Since the hotel room is 72 degrees, that means that the dewpoint outside is above 72.

3) Everybody loves to party. I'm not sure if this is because the city's culture is party-centric, or because people come here to party, but the day doesn't begin until sunset. Which is just as well, since before sunset it is too hot to go outside.

And my biggest disappointment:

I've been here two days so far, and I have yet to see a single cop driving a Ferrari. I guess you can't believe everything you see on TV.

Nothing beats a nice Hubble photo for nerd-sexiness.

This one is one of the nicer ones I've seen recently.

I have many happy memories of this house, which my grandparents lived in for 50 years. The island (from which the photo was taken) is connected to the mainland at low tide by a sandbar, and I (as well as most of my cousins) got stuck on the island more than once as the tide came in.

Sadly, now that my grandparents have passed away, this house will be sold, and most likely demolished. None of my aunts or uncles has the inclination (or money) to fix up the house and live in it, and the lot is simply too valuable for a 100-year-old fixer-upper in this day and age. So, the house where my mother and her 7 siblings, half-siblings, and step-siblings grew up will soon be no more. The house where I, my brother, my sister, and our 15 cousins spent many happy weeks, is likely to be replaced by two or three McMansions.

The joys and sorrows of four generations over a half-century; the life lessons learned in the tides and tidepools; the memories of dozens of people who have been touched by this house and the people who occupied it; these cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

I can only hope that in another hundred years, another three generations of some other family will gather sadly, and when they contemplate the fate of their own slice of this earth, their own memories will be just as cherished as ours.