Jay Cooke State Park...

On the way back from Duluth, we made a stop at Jay Cooke State Park...

Frankly, I was hoping to see some snow melt affecting the height and flow of the St. Louis River...there wasn't much change though.  The Thomson dam keeps a pretty regular flow on the river and the snowmelt hadn't really begun in earnest yet...

But, we got on the bridge and hiked some...the wind was whipping through the valley...

Lex was in this picture, but with the wind, she looked like cousin it and Lukie asked her hair to not be in the picture...

This is just another one of those great scenes in Minnesota...

The Minnesota Zoo...

We went to the zoo for the first time since seeing those amazing Jack-o-laterns last fall...

Right when we got to the zoo, we watched the Bird Show, which is awesome - there are many birds that fly right over your head and the show is very educational...

Then we headed for the Minnesota Trail, we saw this cougar looking proud over it's domain...

And probably stalking us...

Bears have been waking from hibernation recently and apparently, this one is no different...

Trying to avoid the crowd, we went outside to find the tiger on the northern trail...

This is Lex trying to sleep next to one of the two tigers...

The moose was also pretty relaxed...

And the camel...

 The last few summers, the zoo has had kangaroos and other marsupials, but not this summer.  But, apparently it's no prob-llama...

We went to Discovery Bay...saw the turtles and sharks...

After watching a show on what we can do for animals, Lukie and Lex touched the quill of a porcupine...

Apparently, Lex took a nap with the Hawaiian Monk seal...it didn't nap...

The sea otters outside were pretty feisty with each other, Lukie loved that...

 Lex has always played with the penguins...it's like a laser pointer for cats with her...

 But she could stare forever at the flamingoes...

 On the way out, we went through the MN Trail again...Two cougars were out and active...

We could've watched for a long time...

Never a bad day at the zoo...

The Arcade...

Lex was very eager to go to the arcade...surprisingly, Luke didn't care one way or another...but we went anyway...

Lukie started with Skee Ball...the game that will go on forever...

Lex just wanted to bash on something...

But eventually, she went to Skee Ball too...though her first 'roll' hit the cage...and that does not count...

Lukie and I had an epic battle on air hockey...it's hard to document while trying not to let him score...

But, Lukie loved Space Invaders...it is an awesome game...

The simplest game we played was just dropping balls...

As the wheel rotated, you hoped to get as many balls into the canisters as you could...

As a parting shot, why not steal some jewels...

After that, it was back to the pool for all of us...

Canal Park...

On the way back to Duluth (after we left that 'laker' at the ice line), we saw something cool...from a distance, it looked like the Coast Guard Cutter that is based in the Twin Ports.  We were hoping we'd see it come into harbor...

Our first stop was to look at the bridge...

But we could see something way off on the horizon...

And it was getting closer...

We walked out to the lighthouse...

And it just kept coming...

Eventually the bridge went up...

And the Coast Guard cutter was ready to enter port...it had been out in the lake doing some icebreaking...

The ship was the Alder...

We were all impressed, I'd never seen a cutter actively icebreaking and the kids seemed impressed that I hadn't...

After the Alder entered port, we took off for lunch at Little Angies Cantina...but coming out of lunch we saw the bridge was up...we took off...

Broken ice from the harbor had flowed out under the bridge, but now the 989 foot American Century was pushing ice in front of it back to the harbor...

It was cool to watch, but watching these ships come in is pretty cool too...

Once the ship reached a certain distance to the bridge, the ice started to flow around the ship and out into the lake...

This first ship to depart the Twin Ports went under the Aerial bridge on March 22.  The Soo Locks opened on Monday, March 25, so the American Century was one of the earliest arrivals to Duluth for the 2019 shipping season...very cool to see it!

And just like that, the bridge was coming down...always love seeing that...

Then it was back to the hotel for swimming and arcade games...

Gooseberry Falls...

After swimming for a couple of hours this past Tuesday, we got dressed and ready to go to Gooseberry...one of our favorite places in the state...

Now we've been looking at license plates for awhile now and have toyed with the idea of carrying a list of states that we could cross off as we see them, but leaving the hotel we found one we didn't expect!  Lukie was more excited than it shows...

Leaving Duluth, the lake was frozen...

Getting to Gooseberry we got that great view of the lower Gooseberry valley as it heads to the lake...all those stupid leaves aren't in the way of the view...

There is quite a bit of snow in the northwoods yet...and ice if you tried to use the stairs...

I was surprised that the falls were as open as they were...always a great view...

Lukie's big task was to take pictures of the falls for AAA...

He got some good pictures, one of which may be part of his final product...

We had the Middle Falls area to ourselves for awhile and tried to get a picture of all three of us, but it was really icy...Lex was in this picture, until a split second before it was taken (I cropped the top of her hat out)...

And we decided to take the icy stairs to the lower falls for views like this...

And Lex wanted a picture with her in it...so we took one...

Is there ever a bad day on the north shore?

Of course we had to check out the upper falls too...it's just a short walk there...

Not sure what Lukie was doing here?

At Gooseberry though, the lake was ice free...

What is Lukie doing here?

No, he isn't looking for tadpoles...he even said, "they won't be here until the next time we're here."  This day, he was content breaking the thin layer of ice with a stick...

We'd love to be in the area when the waves are rolling from the NE, casting a freezing spray on everything, we've just seen the 'leftovers' in spring...

At the Silver Cliff Creek tunnel wayside rest, we stopped to take a look at a 'laker' that looked to be stopped in the distant ice.  The shipping season started on 3.25 as the Soo Locks in Michigan opened.  Turns out, this ship and others will be a topic of the next post.