You can’t grow up on the shores of Gitchee Gumee and NOT have an interest in rocks. At least when you are a child. I remember having a bit of a rudimentary rock collection. Did I collect it on the beach? Naw, I collected it on a trip around Gitchee Gumee during which my parental units let me buy cheap little rock specimens from various gift shops on the Canadian north shore. That was also the trip that my little brother talked to a French-speaking girl at a rest area and, when The Commander asked him how he communicated with her, he said something like, “You just have to put your mouth in a different way.” Sometimes I wish I had more of the DNA that my brother had. I wouldda been too shy to talk to anybody at that rest area at all…

So, I am not a geologist but one of the reasons I *loved* hanging out on Kelley’s Island this weekend was because we could walk everywhere from our loverly campsite, including old quarries. They were everywhere. Here is the GG in some old crumbling structure on the north loop trail.

We climbed over a rock wall to get to this area. I was grumpy about climbing up that wall and down the other side. When I got down to the other side, I was thinking it looked like a beaver pond. Not so much. Rock surfaces everywhere, some of them with fossils. I actually insisted upon going *back* there Sunday morning, rock wall be damned.

Then there was the East Quarry Horseshoe Lake. I won’t tell you about our vee-hickle expotitions to find out how to get to the trail for this quarry. It turned out that we could take a short walk over to the fish-cleaning hut at our state campground, then walk the beach to a trail that connected to this place. There was a guy trying to skip stones and he was semi-successful but when his mother (or mother-in-law or whoever) joined us to watch, I couldn’t help but spill out that my grandmother was a champion rock skipper. I hope I am not imagining that. I could be!

We walked from this beauteous quarry/lake down to the whinery, where I had a glass of whine and the GG had a wee leetle glass o’ bourbon. Then we walked into town (past the Chocolate Church, at which time I asked the GG if he had anything to confess, snort snort). We did the tourista type thing and then walked the mile up to our campsite to chill out a bit before heading back into town for dinner (this was all on foot). There was a “fancy” restaurant that we were interested in but we ended up at the Captain’s Corner for the second night in a row. It reminds me of the Oscar Tango but the view is better and we wanted that view. BTW, man has it been a while since we’ve been at the OT on a Friday night but we *will* be at the OT this Friday! Jeebus, I hope they remember us there!

P.S. There was poison ivy on all of the trails we walked on Kelley’s Island. Knock on wood, I do not have it. I shouldda tooken a pitcher o’ that but I was too busy making the sign of the cross (even though I am not Catholic).

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