Finally, a short day! There were intermittent storms and I did not have phone service, so I had to guess based on the sky. In the morning, I visited The Homeplace, an 1850s farm recreation. It was a special blacksmith focussed weekend, so I got to learn a bit about different types of furnaces. Because of the weather, it was not busy and I was able to have detailed conversations with the reenactors.
When I got back on the road, the sky started to darken. Then rain. As I got close to the LBL visitor center thunder started as well. I pulled off at the visitor center and waited a couple hours for the rain to clear. I learned that “The Lakes” were created fairly recently by damming the two natural rivers. The government made a controversial decision to displace settlements to do this in order to resolve river flooding issues. The area is now a national recreation area, but also contains hundreds of family cemeteries.
I made it to Grand Rivers at a reasonable time and was lucky to find a campsite at the COE campground during the holiday weekend.