We’ve left Evergreen Park and gotten on the road to LakeVermilion, but it’s a ten-hour drive and we decided to break it and spend the night in Duluth. One of the Subaru’s cool features is that it continuously reports cumulative gas mileage since the last time you reset one of the trip meters. They promised us only 27 mpg on the highway (it’s 4-wheel drive, after all), but we’ve been getting well over 30 actual mpg on long stretches. At one point when we had been slowed for a while to around 50 mph for construction, the gas mileage displayed on the dash was…well, have a look:
Thirty three point nine what??
We didn’t stop for gas to confirm the actual mileage at this point.
We spent the night at the Inn on Lake Superior, it’s right on the lake, as the name suggests, just next door to Duluth’s scenic Aerial Lift Bridge. The waves and white caps on the lake were beautiful, but the bitter wind finally chased us into the nearest pub for a drink.
This is a "lake"???................................................The Aerial Lift Bridge - notice the waves.
As a result we missed watching four huge cargo ships (650 ft long, carrying over 340,000 tons of ore pellets and wheat to England and Italy via the St. Lawrence Seaway) steam under the raised bridge…but we stayed warm! Dinner at the Lake Avenue Cafe was delicious, especially the bacon wrapped dates stuffed with chorizo, yum! Gourmet food in Duluth…who knew?