I pulled down a baking dish to heat up last night’s leftovers for dinner. There was a spider in it. It was alive and energetically crawling around. If The Commander had been here, she prob’ly would’ve grabbed a paper towel and dispatched it PDQ. She had a pretty serious phobia about spiders despite the fact that we only have a couple of dangerous spiders in the Great Lake State and they are rarely seen. I don’t think this spider was dangerous but I dumped it out onto the floor. Lizard Breath, always vigilant about cleanliness (which is good), asked if I was gonna wash the baking dish. Yes. I was. And I did.

Lizard Breath and I drove up to Whitefish Point today. She drove Cygnus X-1 and I looked out the window. After Whitefish Point, we had lunch at the Wheelhouse Diner and Goatlocker Saloon in Paradise. It was wonderful. I had a veggie wrap with pepperjack cheese, black beans, corn, tomatoes, and I dunno what else. I took half of it home but I’m not gonna look up the ingredients now.

Paradise has come a long way since I was a kid and even since my kids were kids. Mainly that means you can get an “upscale” kind of meal instead of a hamburger or whatever, although I certainly could’ve gotten a hamburger today. When I was a kid and we trekked up to the Paradise area (Tahquemenon Falls and Whitefish Point are in the area), we took PBJ sandwiches. We even did that when our kids were kids.

I have never been to the Goat Locker (which is four years old), but Liz and the Twinz of Terror traveled to Paradise last winter and they ate at the Goat Locker *twice* and The Inn once. The Inn sounded familiar to me and I kept asking if it was the gastropub. Because I have eaten at a gastropub in Paradise but it was before COVID and I wondered if that place had survived. In the end, GooMaps told me that it *had* survived and it was called The Inn. It was a good place but we chose the Goat Locker because I hadn’t been there before. It was a good choice although I will be back to The Inn too.

As ecstatic as I am about the relative plethora of restaurant choices in the Paradise area (and the cell service, which has expanded its range significantly), I am less than pleased about the burgeoning number of new dwellings being built along the road up to Whitefish Point. Not to mention that the road is lined with real estate signs. I wish the best for the people who are hot for Lake Superior shoreline property without the rustic conditions the first three American generations of my family dealt with. Outhouses, cold water running through garden hoses (or up from the lake). I get that. We aren’t quite as rustic as we were when I was a child. Hello fiber optic internet and telecommuting. I just hope we aren’t building a new megalopolis along Whitefish Bay.

We really NEVER see moose here at the moominbeach but the Paradise area gets a lot of them. I dunno where this moosehead came from.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2025 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.