Dossin Great Lakes Museum

So, we've been to Belle Isle three times now. This is our first visit to the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. Boy, am I glad we let our friends talk us in to going here. What an interesting place. The last maritime museum I ever came close to was in Honolulu, Hawaii waaaayyyy back in 1993. This place was amazing! Immediately upon entering the front door, you are in The Gothic Room. WOW is all I can say to sum up this room. The architecture is fantastic and one whole wall is covered in a stained glass window depicting French explorer LaSalle discovering Detroit. It was absolutely breath-taking. The window is made up of 700 different pieces and only suffered one broken piece.

Moving on thru the museum, the kids had fun with all the hands-on artifacts. There was more there than I actually took in. It will be very soon when we return to take our time going thru and reading about all the ships and boats and such.

Doug and Nikolas (a wolf scout) looking over Michigan's topography.

There are many shots with a blurry child running thru. These kids were constantly on the move.
Was difficult to get still shots!

Up Periscope! It really worked and gave you a view of
the Detroit River and Cananda to the East.

Nick and Allie discovering the different types of ship's whistles.

Allie and Michael following instructions on flag motions.
This was the letter P according to Allie.

Not only sailors need to know their knots.
Scouts are constantly being quizzed on knot-tying!

After resting for a while, we were informed by a docent that a 1000-foot freighter was coming south down the river and would be passing in about 10 minutes, so we decided to venture outdoors to wait along the river's edge. The docent came out with us and told the boys that if we waved our arms wildly, we might get the attention of the ship's captain and he might signal us. It worked! I think it helped that most of us were wearing bright orange scout shirts!

Took a bit longer than 10 minutes for the freighter to come in to view,
 so we sat and waited patiently.

LOOK! Here it comes!

1000-foot Walter J. McCarthy Jr 

The ship signals "Hello!" by blasting one long blow of the whistle, followed by two short blasts!
We saw the captain wave at us thru the window in the upper left corner.

Tried to get a shot of Doug with the freighter behind him, but his inner demon must have vexed my camera
and I had several shots of blurry yuck! Ship was long gone by the time I got a decent pic.

No sooner does the first ship pass and along comes a second one. The docent went back inside so we had no idea the size of this ship, but I sure love it's name... BARNACLE. Awesome!

Well, we decide to wave like mad again, hoping for another "Hello". We get it! Yayyyy.

This ship's captain actually comes out on deck and checks us out with his binoculars. How cool is that?

So, our day is nearing it's end. We're deep in to the afternoon and I'm tired and sore from all the walking. What a glorious day! The rest of the pics I'll show are just kids being kids.

Allie is the 'Queen of the Coast Guard'

Our friend, Elisa, is in to geo-caching and found a Boy Scouts of America collector's coin in a cache and was instructed to show it in photos, being held by a scout, before placing back in a new cache somewhere scout related.

Where's Doug-O?

This is an actual anchor from the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Doug and Elisa taking a rest on a propeller from the Edmund Fitzgerald.

This concludes our super fun scout day on Belle Isle. There is so much to see on this little island. We're thinking of getting in to way-marking. It's similar to geo-caching, but ya don't need a GPS unit. You locate historical-type statues, signs or buildings, etc and take a photo of/with them. There are lots of way-marks on Belle Isle, so I think we will spend a lot more time down here this summer. Many happy adventures we've had and many more to come. Good night for now.