![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
On the Great Lakes, everyone loves to see a two-masted schooner, white sails flapping in the breeze.
When three tall ships sailed onto Lake Superior in August 2008 for a maritime festival in Duluth, more than 125,000 people turned out, nearly swamping the port town.
"I was on board the Pride of Baltimore when it sailed in, and one of the crew members looked at all the people lining the canal
and said, 'Is this a holiday?' '' said Gene Shaw of Visit Duluth, which organized the festival and is hosting the only Lake
Superior stop on the 2010 Great Lakes United Tall Ship Challenge.
On the western fringes of the Twin Cities, the wealthy have staked out Lake Minnetonka.
Nearly all of its 125 miles of shoreline are privately owned, and the summer cottages built by vacationing flour millers and
businessmen — Pillsbury, Northrop, Bell, Loring, Peavey — have morphed into mansions.
But on the southeast corner of the sprawling lake, one town retains vestiges of the Victorian age, when steamboats ferried vacationers around the lake and day-trippers arrived on electric streetcars.
Many people turn lighthouses into a hobby. In summer, they travel from beacon to beacon, photographing them and collecting stamps in their U.S. Lighthouse Society passports until they've got 60 and can move onto the next passport and, eventually, the "Platinum Circle'' patch awarded after 240 lighthouse visits.
It's not easy to get to every lighthouse, however. Many are on islands or inaccessible by car, so aficionados are quick to sign up for the special boat trips offered during lighthouse festivals.
Below are some of the cruises that will take visitors to lights in the western Great Lakes in 2009. On many, places go
quickly.
As wooded shorelines erupt in fall colors, narrated river cruises become especially popular. That's easy to understand — why not kick back and let the scenery come to you?
On the most scenic part of the Mississippi, pontoons glide past 500-foot bluffs and into backwaters. In the northwoods, they
explore a wild part of the Wisconsin River.
On the Dalles and in the Dells, paddlewheelers, launches and amphibious Ducks give passengers plenty to look at.
In Sault Ste. Marie, tourists find out what floats their boats.
For most, it’s watching serious machinery moving through the Soo Locks. What really floats a boat, however, is 22 million gallons of water, which is what it takes to lift a boat through the Poe Lock, a liquid escalator between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.
It’s a June evening at the Soo Locks, and the Earl W. Oglebay is coming from Silver Bay with a load of taconite. A camera aimed toward Lake Superior catches the 630-foot boat in the distance and projects it onto a TV monitor in the Visitors Center, where boat-watchers have started to gather.
In the middle of Wisconsin, the village of Rural is just far enough off the beaten path.
Founded by Yankees in the 1850s, it was the halfway point on the Stevens Point-Berlin trade route and once had a mill, an inn and a dry goods store.
But when it was bypassed by the railroad in 1870, the village eased into a slow, genteel decline.
