I looked east over Lake Michigan for more than fifty years before I got to look the other way when I took the car ferry to Muskegon, Michigan in 2008. Today I get to do it again, this time from Bay Harbor near Charlevoix, Michigan. It gets more interesting.
We are staying at the Marriott at Bay Harbor, which is built on an old limestone quarry and Portland cement plant. This has special meaning to me, since my father worked for 36 years at Medusa Cement & I loaded the stuff during four summers 1973-77. Our cement didn’t usually come from this quarry, which was owned by a competing firm, Penn Dixie. But Medusa used a nearby quarry in Charlevoix. The rock is pretty much the same. My father got lots of overtime when the ship came in from Michigan. The rock from Michigan built the freeways in Wisconsin.
You wouldn’t know this was an old industrial site if nobody told you. The old dock is now just a little concrete jetty. The deepest part of the quarry is now “Bay Harbor.” They removed the rock separating the quarry from Lake Michigan. It looks good. The old walls of the operation look like bluffs. If you look close, they do not seem perfectly natural, but I suppose a few more years of weathering will take care of it.
The top picture is sunset from our porch at the hotel. Next is the porch from the window.Third is a boat on the lake at a minute after the sun has dropped below the horizon. And below us is the hotel.
