The Legend Lives on...

....Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below, Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
---from "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", by Gordon Lightfoot

For the past couple of weeks we've been following the flow of the Great Lakes, starting near Duluth, Minnesota and now nearing Niagara Falls.  I never really thought much about how water flows between the lakes, but now that we're "flowing" from one to the next, we figured it out.  Apparently inflow to the lakes is only around 1% of the total volume.  We didn't actually see Lake Superior, so the uppermost lake we rode along was Lake Michigan. Here's Gayle frolicking on a Lake Michigan beach before Mackinac Bridge.

Lakes Huron and Michigan are connected at the straits of Mackinac, and some technical references consider them a single body of water. 

Lake Huron wraps around the "thumb" of Michigan and water from it flows through the St. Clair River and the Detroit River into Lake Erie.  Lake St. Clair, in between the two rivers, isn't considered a great lake, but it is more than 25 miles across, which, in my book, makes it a pretty "great" lake.  Here we are crossing the St. Clair River at Courtright, Ontario.

The last several days we've been riding along the north side of Lake Erie.  Lake Erie isn't very deep, less than 100' on average, but we had several nice views today.

 Here's Paul C. enjoying our first glimpse of the Pennsylvania coast across Lake Erie, a distance of about 30 miles.

From Erie, the water flows into the Niagara River, and then flows over Niagara Falls, and into Lake Ontario, making that lake 320' lower than the others.  So tomorrow we'll "flow" along that waterway and try to stay out of floating barrels.