we drove down to pere marquette on friday afternoon, and the GPS wanted us to take I-72 to route 67. this was a delightful change from the overwhelmingly monotonous I-55. I wonder how may hundreds of times we’ve been down that boring, flat stretch of road? Route 67 took us through some little towns i’d heard of but never seen. a good drive, and it was also quite nice to only have to drive a couple of hours to get to our camping destination.
we set up our pop-up pretty quickly at the campground. i think there were maybe three or so other pop-ups; everybody else was in motorhomes of varying sizes and degrees of fanciness. i’d thought that it would be quicker to set up a motor home; you just park it, right? but a guy pulled up next to us in a huge, very fancy pull-behind kind of thing, and he must have spent at least two hours setting the thing up. he had a fancy built-in kitchen thing on the side, complete with wooden cabinets, a microwave, and more stuff that i couldn’t see so closely because i hadn’t thought to bring my binoculars. but on the other hand, i think he’d have noticed if i was standing there looking at him through the binoculars.
we hiked over to the lodge, which is SO BEAUTIFUL. i love it, and would like to stay there someday, except we couldn’t bring mollie, so that wouldn’t be much fun without our happy dog.
kevin took most of the photos on this trip, which was refreshing for me, so i didn’t spend all my time obsessively taking way too many pictures.
you can kind of see one of the cabins through the trees. they looked nice, with fireplaces, although i think garrick told me you can’t use the fireplaces anymore but that sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? the lodge was built by the civilian conservation corps, i think in the 30s?
here’s the lovely lobby. i kept going in to check it out, plus to use the bathroom and look at the gift shop and find out when the winery was open, but there were rarely any people at all sitting around.
it would be so cozy to sit in front of that huge fireplace in the winter.
that’s the back deck; you can just see a table and chairs out there. we got carryout from the restaurant on saturday night and had dinner out there with our puppies.
this is across the road – there’s supposed to be a marina, but the road leading to it was completely submerged.
in the background there is a picnic shelter. you’d have to swim out to it, but it’s probably not a good idea to do the swimming.
kevin took this picture on friday; it rained friday night while we were sleeping, then again on saturday night. i wish he’d gotten another picture of this little building, because the water was even higher by sunday.
mollie, of course, was delighted to trot around in the water.
this is a tiny little frog that kevin spotted. i wish there was something else there in the dirt so you could see how very very tiny he is.
this is what our camper looked like on friday night – much neater than in times past. since we were only gone for two nights we didn’t feel it necessary to bring absolutely everything we own.
mollie did her best to try to relax.
janice and garrick joined us later friday night, and we sat around our camp fire. it was supposed to be in the high 90s during the weekend, but luckily that didn’t happen. i had spent the week obsessively checking weather.com for hourly updates, but even the very last one i checked before we left was completely wrong.
soon, more pictures.
“soon” always being a relative term, of course. i have to go work in the yard now.
ok then,
mrs. thursday afternoon hughes.