Greetings from the Gitche-Gumee. Gitche-Gumee was popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow‘s poem “The Song of Hiawatha”, Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, and is the name the Ojibwe people used for Lake Superior. It is actually a variation of the Ojibwe word “gichi-gami or “great sea”. It is also the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes.

We are camped on the West shore of Lake Superior. We left Fargo North Dakota this morning and traveled east across Minnesota. What a beautiful state! It is called the state of 10,000 lakes and we can understand why. So many lakes in the small area we saw. The state is very green with varieties of pines and deciduous trees, many of which are changing colors.

Here is our campsite last night in Fargo.

Tomorrow we are headed to Cumberland, Wisconsin to visit Pauline Nelson. Pauline was our family haircutter for over 20 years and moved to Wisconsin to be near her family.

We are blown away by the extreme diversity that we’ve seen so far in our country—the topography, the people, the towns, the neighborhoods, the types of houses, and the traffic and lack of. And we are only about sixth of the way into our sojourn!