Sleeping Bear Dunes – July 25, 2015

We were up, dressed, coffee in hand and in the car by 8 AM this morning.  This is our longest driving day and this happened because we couldn’t find a place to stay.  We heard others in the hotel talking about it too.  It started raining on us while we were loading the car and poured for much of the way to Traverse City before clearing up and the sun peeking through the clouds.  We stopped at a roadside stand and bought some cherries.  They are in season here right now.  While chatting after that Debbie said she needed to turn around because there was something I needed to see.  This was so funny….it was a tree just covered in pairs of shoes!  It really was too funny for words…a shoe tree.  By the time we reached Traverse City the sun was shining.  Debbie had found this bakery she wanted to find called the Grand Traverse Pie Company.  We find it and go in and got two slices of cherry pie and had the cherry coffee with it….yummy!  It was oh so good that we got a small pie to go and Debbie bought some of the coffee to take home.  We attempted to find the lighthouse on the peninsula but that didn’t go well.  There were no signs to help either so we gave up.  The scenery was beautiful and this city is just a gorgeous, upscale seaside town.

From there our goal was to find Sleeping Bear Dunes which is a National Park.  We were taken on quite the round about trip through many back roads and finally came to the dunes.  Also not what we expected.  Debbie was excited to get her Senior Park Pass since she is now old enough to get one.  They are valuable as you get in free to most of the parks or pay a much reduced fee is there is one.  We used mine when we did all the parks out west a few years ago.  Anyway we go in and watch people on this giant dune try to climb to the top.  The kids were having a blast while most adults sank up to their knees in the sand and were frustrated.  We decided to forego the dunes and move on to try to find the beautiful lighthouse at Ludington.  This is where Bitchin Betty our GPS took us on an unusual detour through dense woods on a dirt road that was only wide enough for one car.  I was relieved when we came out to see a real road at the end of the forest!  We drove to Ludington and found the lighthouse.  It was pretty but I guess the pictures we saw did it more justice than being there in person.  It was a cute little town though.  By now it is afternoon and we hadn’t eaten anything since pie that morning so we started looking for a place to have lunch.  We get to the little lakeside town of Pentwater and had lunch outside at the Village Café.  When the breeze started blowing off the lake we thought we should have brought our jackets as it got a bit chilly.  We saw a bride and groom wandering around the street with a couple others from their wedding party we assumed.   When we finished we got on the road to our final destination of Kalamazoo.  It was another two and a half hours of driving before we arrived.  We got checked into the Hampton Inn where we will spend tonight and tomorrow night.  We ordered pizza and it was really good or we were really hungry.  Now we are in stare mode and tired from another active day. 

 

This is the road Betty told us to take...dirt and we were on it for a few miles!