Michigan!

This post is going to be a completely inadequate description of how much fun we had in Michigan with Mat's sister Jenny, and her family Steve, Ben, and Megan. To read a great post about our trip, please feel free to visit my brother-in-law's blog because he did a fantastic job with the details and pictures. The details are getting a little fuzzy for me now and we forgot our camera on a couple of key parts of the trip, but the main thing is that it was GREAT!

We visited Mackinac (pronounced MACK-in-aw) Island twice on the trip. We stopped there once on our way to the Upper Penisula and loved it so much that we changed our plans so that we could go there again on the way home. Mackinac Island used to be home to Native Americans, a military fort, and now it's mostly a tourist destination. You take a ferry to get to the island, and there are no cars allowed so everyone rides bikes or in horse drawn carriages. We rented bikes and rode the 8 miles around the whole island and it was just so, so fun. We also rode in a carriage, and visited the fort, the famous Grand Hotel, the beach, and the abundant fudge shops. The first day we were rushing to make it on the ferry and forgot our camera, so I don't really have any pics of our awesome bike ride, but it was awesome. Did I already say that?

These are all pictures from the fort where there was a lot of cool old-timey stuff to do.







View from the fort.



The Grand Hotel. Incidentally the movie "Somewhere in Time" with Christopher Reeve was filmed here, but I've never seen it. This place is so fancy that they have a dress code. You have to be wearing a suit or a dress after about 4pm, so we didn't linger too long here.




The beach on Mackinac at sunset.



The famous lighthouse off the coast of the island.



The Ferry.



This is Mackinac Bridge which separates the Lower Peninsula of Michigan from the Upper Peninsula (aka the UP).



So after our first trip to Mackinac we toured a few lighthouses and then headed to the UP. We went to the beach...that's right the beach! It was so awesome! Totally clean, fresh water. Lots of sun and nice temps. The water was chilly, but the kids didn't care a bit.




We were staying near the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior (just across the lake from Canada). So we took an evening cruise to look at the pictured rocks. It's hard to describe, but all the cliffs on this part of Lake Superior are beautiful, like a painting. Again, Steve's blog is better.







We also did a few hikes at Pictured Rocks. The trees were huge, and the views were awesome.







We spent one day on Grand Island. This is an uninhabited island about the size of Manhattan. It was the perfect combination of all the things we were loving about the trip - the biking, the hiking, and the beach. This was a really special day. It was so unusual to be surrounded by nature, and not see hardly any other people all day.








When we finally got back to Jenny and Steve's town, we got to celebrate Megan's birthday! She had a party at the indoor tennis center with a lot of her friends.



I'll spare you the post-birthday-party-Wii-dancing-after-party videos, but you better believe you can check them out on Steve's blog.