Back to not dying today – though fevers do apparently yield some odd dreams.
Sometime not that long after the trip to Mackinac, there was a trip to the Traverse City area. One of the things to do was go to the Sleeping Bear Dunes – Janet had never been there before and I hadn’t been there in a while. We started on the hike back to Lake Michigan, but didn’t make it – in part because maybe we didn’t really try very hard and in part because the hot sand gave me a blister that then turned into a sizable hole in the sole of my foot. There are a few pictures that may someday surface from the actual Dune Climb.
In addition to the Dune Climb, there is Pierce Stocking Drive (which until this very moment, I always though was Pier Stocking Drive – seemed like an odd name for Pier). It winds up and through the dunes, just to the south of the climb I think. On this drive is the Lake Michigan overlook which is a 450′ dune, and despite the name is climbable and not just for looking. To take a section of that Wiki article:
Overlook 9 is next to the bluff on Lake Michigan, 450 feet (140 m) above the water […]. These two locations are considered especially hazardous because of the heights involved. In 2002, the Detroit Free Press noted that a half-dozen visitors have to be rescued by paramedics at these two overlooks after falls. The community of Glen Arbor has a special off-road vehicle to effect rescues from the base of the cliffs.
And, this picture of some random sailboat on Lake Michigan was taken from that overlook, having no other connection to the blathering above. I don’t know anything about that boat or the person sailing it, and it’s not even a very good picture from a technical standpoint as I for some reason decided (or forgot I had previously decided) to take it at f/11, yielding a shutter speed that was too slow for the amount of movement present. I just like the little orange boat against the patterns in the blue water.
Picture taken with Canon 60D, EF-S 18-135mm lens @ 135mm, f/11, 1/60 sec shutter, ISO 100
