Showing posts with label northern michigan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label northern michigan. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Variations On A Theme: The Impromptu Vacation



Hey audience! Glad to see you've dwindled down to nothing after our brief stint of Facebook popularity! I know I promised that when we next met I would entertain you with more from our recent trip to Hilton Head, but my dear friend Matt has inspired me to write about something which is also dear to my heart, the impromptu vacation.

Matt did a great job covering what it is that makes pointing at a map and saying "Fuck it, let's go" such a memorable way to vacation and I just wanted to touch on a few of the memories I have with such trips.

Before I grew old, these kinds of trips were a lot easier. There were no full time jobs, the idea of marriage was about as non-existent as the idea of even talking to girls, and no one would even think about having kids for years to come. At the time, my best random travel experiences were with my good friends Jason and Justin. Like Matt, we too took a random trip to Toronto. I want to save that for a later entry, though, as I have since been back and have much more to say about the most wonderful city in North America.

Instead, I'd like to touch on a random day trip we made to Northern Michigan, specifically Traverse City and the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. I don't really remember what the exact circumstances were behind the trip. Probably, we all had a day to kill an spent some time staring at a map and figuring out what we could possibly get up to in a day. As I mentioned earlier, my family had spent almost all of our summers in this area and no trip was complete without spending a day at Sleeping Bear. We loved the exhausting work which climbing the dunes entailed which would all culminate with a race back down.

This picture is actually from a later trip but I don't care because it's beautiful.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Interlochen or Why You Should Never Go Back



As I've mentioned before, my family wasn't much for traveling great distances when I was younger. Almost all of my childhood vacations were spent in Northern Michigan, specifically Interlochen State Park. Interlochen is probably most known for the Center for the Arts/music camp which has hosted several notable alumni like Josh Groban, Norah Jones, and Sufjan Stevens. Our summers were mostly spent tenting it up within the campground.

Looking back, I wish my travel experience had been more robust, but in my younger years, I loved getting to sleep in a tent, ride my bike throughout the campground, making friendships on the playground that would last an entire week, and swimming in waters that were very much lacking in any sort of creature with the capability to kill you. 
A big logging wheel. I used to climb the shit out of this thing.