Jessica and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary (and nine years together) and traveled all the way around Lake Michigan earlier this month.
I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan (living in suburban Chicago, visiting Michigan and Wisconsin with my family during many summers as a kid), and Jessica has been introduced to it several times since the first time she visited (me in) Chicago–back during New Years 2003. I remember as I met her after her flight into O’Hare how amazed she was at the size of the lake, which she had just seen from the airplane. “It’s like an ocean,” she said.
Now was a good time (though it proved a little cooler a late summer than we quite expected at times [like when we were camping on Big Bay and it was 33 degrees Fahrenheit]) to take a circle tour around Lake Michigan.
I was excited to show northern Wisconsin, Upper Michigan and northern Michigan to my wife (a native Californian who hadn’t yet ventured north of Milwaukee), and see some new areas with her.
We arranged for my parents and brother to watch our birds (it was very nice of them) and planned a trip that included Spring Green, Madison, Osh Kosh, and along Green Bay to Oconto, and Marinette, Wisconsin, along with camping at Big Bay de Noc and visiting Seul Choix Bay and over to St. Ignace in Upper Michigan, and then over the Mackinac Bridge to Mackinaw City. While in town we had T-shirts made for our band and then we used Mackinaw City as our port of departure for our boat to Mackinac Island and spent a day cycling around, exploring, eating ice cream and fitting in a nice lunch before more cycling and then fudge shopping.
The next day we set out to see northern (lower peninsula) Michigan, visiting Petoskey, Traverse City, Leelanau State Park, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Glen Lake, Crystal Lake, Frankfort, Manistee, Stony Lake, and Michago, in western (lower peninsula) Michigan.
We started the two-week trip off in the countryside west of Madison seeing two Shakespeare plays [The Tempest and Taming of the Shrew] (in the rain, as it were) with some of my family including my parents, sisters, brother-in-law, cousins and more. Between the plays we had a nice picnic.
After we circled around the lake and got back to Chicago, we were glad to see our birds and also glad that we had gone all that way up north and seen so much beautiful country.
We finished up the trip by spending a few days in Indianapolis as Jessica attended the Exact Target conference [which included getting “pit” access at the Katy Perry concert], after which Jessica, the birds and I all finally made it back to the Cleveland area.
Along the way we took a lot of photos and saw lots of cool birds including a hawk, a crane, swans, an eagle, and a flock of wild turkeys. It was a good trip with beautiful sunrises and sunsets and lots of adventure.
