Fourth of July 2011 Edition

Playing “blog-entry-catchup” here, but backdating things so no one will know…

Fourth of July weekend is kind of a big deal for Traverse City, the surrounding area and probably anywhere that has an economy reliant on summer tourism. It’s a popular time to come back to visit, and Mark and Ashley were going to be back in Michigan for a week. Since I wanted to see them and Janet, I invited her up for a stressful weekend of meeting the entire family and many of the extended family.

Since she had never been North of Grand Rapids until this winter for skiing, all the summer fun things of Northern Michigan were new… which made a nice excuse to revisit some activities from the past. I got to Traverse City on Friday, and joined Mark and Ashley for the visit to Cedar and Polka Fest – Janet did not make it into town until very early that morning, so she missed out on that.

One of the most important of events was a trip to and up the Sleeping Bear Dunes. This also is a prime opportunity for picture taking.

The group atop the Dunes and looking out over Glen Lake.

One of the reasons that you go to the Dunes is to jump off the high points as in this fine exhibit.

The sand was incredibly hot, but I have issue with wearing shoes for the dune climb. This was a mistake, and at this point I had started to develop a nice blister in the middle of my right food. This eventually turned into a hole about an inch and a half wide in my foot… and I stole Kenzie’s shoes for the walk down.

This is Pier Stocking drive. Due to the hole in my foot, there was no plan to slide down and climb back up this time.

After the dunes, we did a cruise down the Platte River. I’ve probably done this 100 times, making it an easy classic. Apparently I didn’t take any pictures of our journey, but this is representative (and even understating) of the mass of people.

Sunday we went out on Kyle’s boat and Janet and I stopped briefly in town for a quick Cherry Festival experience – as usual, if you live there, downtown is not really the place you want to be during Cherry Festival.