4 posts tagged “camping”

The Up North Tour continued the weekend before last, with our annual camping trip to the Leelanau Peninsula. As has been custom for the last six years, Tom and I meet up at the tip of the pinky for some rustic camping and a few days of decompressing in what has slowly become one of my favorite places to be.

Seemingly, every year, I come back with the same set of photos, so I've limited them this year. The highlight of the weekend? It certainly wasn't being jammed on one campsite with six other people, three of them children, I will tell you that. No, it was the annual dog parade in Northport, a city more than 100 years old and holding just under 700 people in this picture-perfect northern Michigan community. Every year, around mid-August, they host a themed dog parade that runs through downtown. The theme for 2008 was an Indiana Jones takeoff, something about "Indiana Bones and the Raiders of the Lost Bark." It was cute and whimsical, and a nice distraction for the afternoon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And while years past have yielded some consistent imagery of wineries, wooded views and assorted shots of peninsula life, the sky above Lake Michigan, to me, never gets old.

 

Because I tend to be lazy, I've taken a full week to post some shots from last weekend's inaugural camping weekend. I found a great state park in Port Crescent, right at the very tip of Michigan's Thumb, and a short drive from Bill and Lindsay's place in Caseville. I met Glom up there on Friday (after working a half-day) and set up the tent. I had a great site.

Every August, in conjunction with my birthday and the Woodward Dream Cruise (the former is to be embraced, the latter avoided), I go camping with one of my best friends, Glom, at Leelanau State Park in Northport.

It's a beautiful place to camp, and, for my money (or what's left of it) I rank the Leelanau Peninsula as one of my top three or five places to be. The scenery is stunning, the air is crisp and, I don't know, there is just a specific feeling attached to that part of the state for me, one that is very nearly indescribable. Got a place you dig? Got a place where, in order to get there, you're willing to pack two days worth of work into one day and drive four and a half hours to get there? Got a place where, after you return from there your re-entry into the your normal world is difficult and uncomfortable? That's this place for me. After enjoying a Tigers win on my birthday proper, I got up Friday, finished packing, had breakfast with Kerry and hit the road. When I checked in, I was disappointed at first because this was my campsite.

Great, I gt to set up my tent right by the campground's road/path. Uh, that kind of sucks. But I walk into that little clearing you see there and found a cove of trees in which my tent fit perfectly.

To the rear of my tent, I see this:

To the front, and through the small clearing, I get this view of Lake Michigan:

Glom would show up about 2 hours later. We tooled around a little bit before we cooked dinner over the tripod grill and got blown out on wine and angel dust. OK, OK, I'm kidding about the dust. We woke up painfully early Saturday morning. Heidi had tipped us off to an event called the "Fly-In" held that morning at the nearby Woolsey Airport, this grassy little municipal airport just down the road from the campground. She'd mentioned pancakes, so we got up, hazy as hell and headed to the airfield at 8 a.m. for some flapjacks.

The food hit the spot. But the best part were the beverage options. They offered three — coffee, juice or, get this, orange Gatorade. I was bordering on hungover and that Gatorade, and two plates of pancakes, I believe saved me. Glom loaded up.

So this fly-in was actually kind of neat. These single-engine planes fly in, like, every 15 minutes. And while I'm not a huge aficianado of all things aviation, it was rather interesting.

Also included in the program was a classic car show. And while I'd escaped metro Detroit because of the 1 million people and 30,000 hot rods choking Woodward Avenue for a few days, the Motor City in me got to take in a couple dozen of sharp rides.

We left out of the car show and  took in some more of the peninsula before it started to rain. We left some of our gear out, including the wood, so we  high-tailed it back to the campground. There, I decided to nap. The sound of rain on your tent, with you inside dry as a bone and high as a kite, will put anyone to sleep like a  baby. Like a very stoned baby. I would get up about two hours later and take a long walk around the campground. They have an old lighthouse and all sorts interesting looking shit on the grounds there, including this birdhouse.

A fellow camper apparently felt a creative urge.

I roused Glom up around 3 and we headed to what has become an annual highlight for us, the Pow Wow in Peshawbestown. Heidi and her folks hooked us up with this years ago and now we go pretty consistently. We usually met them there before heading to Fred and Diane's for dinner, which, this year, and like every year before it, did not disappoint (ribs, chicken, brats, lentils, pasta salad, sweet corn, potato salad, lime-aid). But the pow wow itself is a pretty intense and respect-demanding event. A narrator kind of guides you through what you're watching and what it all means. It's fucking beautiful.

We would head back to camp later that night, after hanging with Fred and Diane, Heidi and the kids, and this very interesting business associate of Fred's, Eric. Eric was a trip, a former Frenchman living in Brazil. Glom and I burned more wood into the night before he kicked my ass, six straight, at Yahtzee. Man, I couldn't roll for shit, I swear. Horrible.

We got up Sunday, had lunch at the Bluebird and visited our favorite gift store, the Thundebird. They have a huge "Jesus is Lord" sign on one side of the building, and on the other, this:

And by the "king" I don't think they mean Elvis. I got a nice leather watch bracelet that, in Royal Oak, would be about $55 at Shine or some goddamn place. I paid $6 for it here.

Tom would take off after a swim in a very cold Lake Michigan. I met Heidi for a couple of beers back at the Bluebird and about two hours of conversation that's been overdue for about six months. She made a great point. We live five minutes from each other in Detroit, yet it took us to drive nearly five hours away from our homes to get together for a couple of beers. It was some great quality time and I'm hoping we can all keep the momentum going.

I spent the evening back at the fire, listening to the waves. Have I mentioned how much I dig it up there? I like to ramble along the roads around there, enjoying the subtly brilliant sights.

I got home on Monday and Kerry made us a fine meal. I love Leelanau and miss it when I get back to Detroit, but it was good to be home.

This upcoming weekend will mark the annual camping pilgrimage I make with one of my oldest and best friends, Glom. Me, Glom and Jason used to run pretty wild in the streets (running! running! wild in the streets! running! running!). Anyway, me and Glom go to Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula in the middle of August every year to a.) get away from the Woodward Dream Cruise, and to b.) embrace my birthday celebration. The weekend consists of some of the best camping ever, right at the face of Lake Michigan, the annual multi-tribe powwow in nearby Peshawbestown, swimming in Lake Michigan and a lot of driving throuh Suttons Bay, Leland and Glen Arbor. We may drive to Charlevoix to see another childhood friend of ours, Harold. But it's always back to the campsite for nights filled with this ...