Summer Trip to Northern Michigan

You know how sometimes you really take time to craft a nice, long email or posting and then, at the last second, some crazy little thing happens and you lose it all? Yeah. That happened to me a few days ago when I meant to post about our trip. Now you're just going to get the short version and hopefully the pictures can do the talking for me. This summer we chose to travel all over our own great (lakes) state to save a little dough for a sunnier excursion in the winter. We started with Higgins Lake, my beloved camping destination since I was a small child. Like so many others, I feel like this is MY lake, and it truly is a piece of my history; my family has camped here almost every year of my life for as long as I can remember. As usual, the water was ice cold and the weather was less than nice, but we were still rewarded with a gorgeous sunset (photo one), bountiful fishing, and diamond-clear water against a lush forest backdrop. After four days at Higgins we climbed north to St. Ignace to spend a day on Mackinaw Island. We prepared to spend two, but, really, one is all you need. We hiked to all of the landmarks, visited the forts, rode a tandem bike around the entire island, and even braved a haunted museum that scared me nearly to death when I was a toddler. Believe it or not, it still gave me a few good scares! While in the U.P. we made a "quick" trip up to the upper (photo two) and lower Taquamenon Falls, as Brad had never seen them before. Of course they were beautiful, but since we were up there around 8:30pm there were no other tourists... and it was spooky quite. After a short stop in Mackinac City we headed down and over to Traverse City for our final night. While there we lounged on the state park beach, purchased some "famous" cherries from a roadside market vendor, watched some fudge get made (before we bought and ate it, haha), and spent some time over at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. The hike up the dune was arduous as usual (even for someone who gets an awful lot of physical activity), and, as always, completely worth the gorgeous view and sense of accomplishment. There's nothing like climbing a few hundred feet to feel like you're on top of the world.