Just got back from Sleeping Bear Dunes with the family. A national park in Northern Michigan. $12 per night. We stayed for 3 nights. $36 plus the ten dollar park entry fee, so $46.
Fourty six bucks.
Plus gas and groceries which we packed and took with us, plus wood because transporting wood is a no-no due to spread of nasty tree eating insects. We're looking at a healthy four day vacation in a National Park for under $200 for a family of four.
Hurray for the socialist national park system, eh?
That place was clean as all get out, and you could just wander down to the lake under the midnight Milky Way and start a fire along the beach and hang out and nobody would come to bother you about it.
The Boy and I walked out to the Big Lake overlooking the Manitou Islands on Thursday Night, in the crystal clear night and watched the Persiad meteor showers amidst the juniper berries and the perfumed sent of cedar campfires.
The ancient Native American story of Sleeping Bear goes like this:
Long ago, along the Wisconsin shoreline, a mother bear and her two cubs were driven into Lake Michigan by a raging forest fire. The bears swam for many hours, but eventually the cubs tired and lagged behind. Mother bear reached the shore and climbed to the top of a high bluff to watch and wait for her cubs. Too tired to continue, the cubs drowned within sight of the shore. The Great Spirit Manitou created two islands to mark the spot where the cubs disappeared and then created a solitary dune to represent the faithful mother bear.
Where we camped, two large Lake Michigan islands, the Manitou islands, were clearly visible while we swam in the clear waters and dove for rocks to build into temporary imaginary cities along the shores.
It was difficult to believe that the lake we were swimming in 150 miles north of our home was the same lake, the same waters we swim in just a few blocks from our home...and the islands in the distance have been part of Native American mythology since pre-historic times.
North Manitou island is a forest preserve. 22 square miles of fresh water island and nobody lives there. Just wilderness. Looking across the lake to the two islands in the evening, North Manitou is black, not a light shining from it. South Manitou has only a single light house light shimmering out from its Southern end.
Overlooking the Manitou islands on the mainland, a massive system of dunes with inclines so sharp down to Lake Michigan, you can stand at the top of a 450 foot dune and see only the Lake over the sharp sandy dune curve with sea gulls flying below. Some folks brave the 45 degree drop, confident that an manageable incline exists over the edge and run down to the Lake. But a half hour climb back to the top is inevitable.
In 1995 a sand cliff along the Sleeping Bear shoreline collapsed due to an unusually warm winter and dune and tree debris from the event was found two miles out in Lake Michigan.
Erosion takes its toll and the dunes shift. The ancient stories of the sleeping bear, the mother bear, a tree covered dune along a bluff, is giving way to erosion and warmer temperatures...just 100 years ago the sleeping bear dune itself was 236 feet high. Today it is 103 feet high.
Shipwreck off the coast of the Sleeping Bear Dunes