Adventures at the Lake

I’ve only traveled to Lake Michigan a handful of times in my adult life, I never find the time or the money to be able to make it up to Holland or Grand Haven, and something always seems to get in the way. While my experiences with the lake are few, they were memorable and only mad more so by the lake.

During the last eclipse in the fall of last year, my boyfriend and I made a spontaneous decision to drive up to Lake Michigan to watch it. His mom's roommate at the time owned property on the private side of the lake, so we set off towards it once we got into Holland. It was about 4 a.m. and it was incredibly cold, colder than we imagined it would be (which is why we failed to bring proper warmth besides scant fall jackets). To get into the beach itself, there is a steep incline you have to trek up, one that is very physically demanding. Once we made our way up the hill, we started towards the beach. Being so early in the morning, and in the middle of fall, there were no other people around, we had entire beach to ourselves. You could hear the waves from almost a mile off. The wind was piercing and the cold was biting, but we managed to stay for almost two hours before we decided the eclipse wasn't worth the cold. During the walk back to the car (around 6 am), we would glance back at the moon, keeping our eye on it, and we managed to catch the last glimpse of it while we drove out of Holland and away from the lake.

During the Fourth of July weekend this summer, we made another trip up to Holland, this time to camp out for the holiday. We brought all the essentials with us (being that our area was not an actual campsite), including a grill, cooler, and charcoal. We parked in the woods, and climbed up a flight of stairs that easily contained over 150 steps, on a massively steep overgrown forest dune. Walking along the top of the dune, we got to another challenge (while lugging all of our equipment along the way, a sand dune, and a relatively large one at that, (if we thought that the hill to the eclipse was steep then this was downright vertical). We spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to climb up the dune with the tent and all, using the equipment we had as sort of grips to keep from sliding all the back down to the bottom. It was well worth the trek however, the view of the open expanse of valley was amazing, with small tufts of weedy grass sticking out of the sandy earth, and all of it surrounded by woods and just a short walk through those woods, Lake Michigan.