A Great Day for a Beach Wedding

 Started out this morning by taking a walk around the campground.  We both remarked that it was surprisingly quiet here last night, for being a crowded campground, and our position and the wind direction made it so that we avoided most of the smoke that is so much a part of large campgrounds.  Overall, a pleasant night.

After breakfast (which included Nueske bacon), we drove to the pedestrian parking lot for the Silver Lake Sand Dunes and walked the dunes for a while.  We watched the ORV area for a bit and recorded a few for Alex, who is so into cars and things that go.

On the way out we drove past Grace Adventures, a place that is very popular with the SOWERs during the summer.  Then on to Pentwater which we discovered was raging busy because of an art fair going on.  No room to park at the state park so we managed to find street parking a few blocks away from downtown and checked out the art fair.  Lots of cool stuff made by local artisans that would probably look good in other people’s houses.

Since it was now past noon and we were getting quite hungry, we stopped at one of our usual stops, Bortell’s Fisheries, for lunch.  This is a little hole-in-the-wall place near nothing significant, but, as the lines can attest, is very popular.  Fish isn’t cheap--we dropped thirty bucks for a pound of fried lake perch, but the wait and the cost are worth it.  We parked at Summit Park across from Bortell’s to eat our catch.

Summit park is one of those relatively undiscovered county parks but today was very busy as there was a wedding that was soon to happen on the beach.  After finishing our lunch, we took our lawn chairs down to the beach and sat at the water’s edge with our feet in the water, enjoying the perfect weather.  We also watched the wedding happenings.  It was interesting watching them try to hold down the aisle runner in the stiff wind that was blowing. The ceremony started at 3:30.  I’m not sure it lasted even ten minutes.  But it was a great day for it and we had front row seats, sitting on the beach just a hundred feet or so from the gathering.

We had just left when we got a text from our Boondocker’s Welcome host, wondering what our ETA was. We stopped in the parking lot of a small church on the Pere Marquette Highway to see how far it was away from our current position.  Turns out it was less than a mile down the road so we drove down there and met the host.  Jill turned out to be a pleasant woman, a widow and former full-time RVer.  She still lives full time in her Winnebago Adventurer RV, parked on a concrete slab behind the cornfield on the place where she grew up, and takes off to Arizona for several months of the year.

Having checked in with our host, we headed towards Ludington, stopping at a couple thrift stores before ending up at the state park.  We made dinner with some leftovers that Deb had squirreled away in the freezer a couple weeks ago and then took a bike ride through the state park and the campground.  It’s always interesting to observe how other people camp.  We are the kind that are always moving, usually stopping at a place just to have a place to spend the night.  Others come to a campground in large groups and set up a site that looks like they will live there for years, with their outdoor kitchens and cooking appliances and camp games and gazebos.  Must have taken hours to set it all up.  Both are fun in their own way--we just gravitate towards the former when it’s just the two of us.

After a walk along the beach, we headed back to the cornfield.  Jill came out with a bowl of cherries and we invited her in for some cheesecake and some conversation.  We talked for probably an hour and a half.  Fellow RVers always have something in common and as a general rule are pleasant people with lots of stories to tell, and she was no exception.

Weather today was amazing--mid 70’s for the high, down to 55 tonight.  Good sleeping weather and it’s super quiet here.