Category: Flowers and Outdoors

Camping at Interlochen State Park 2015

I was waiting for G+ to make a nice Story from my camping trip. Unfortunately it made two separate stories, one of them titled Cedar Springs, MI, which was where I stopped at a Meijer grocery store for lunch items. I couldn’t add the proper photos to either of the two Stories, so here you go. The old fashioned way.

My two person tent from REI was big enough for my wife and me and Ana. I got to try my new sleeping bag from REI. It’s super lightweight for backpacking. The temperature at night didn’t get below 50 °F so I was too hot in my new bag, until about 3 AM each night. Ana had her own ‘travel’ bed. My cousin had some old carpet that we used for the entrance of the tent and also for Ana to lay on. Park rules required her to be on leash all the time. So we often had her on her super long leash, tied to a tree. She really enjoyed looking for chipmunks. I saw some raptors up in a dead pine tree next to my tent on the first day, while setting up camp. I couldn’t get a good picture but they looked like peregrine falcons.

We ate pretty well. I got to try out my new Primus backpacking stove. It worked really well and boiled water super fast. I just bought a larger pot for it this morning (0.5L to 1L).

Foil packets for dinner:

Cod, onion, butter, lemon, dill, parsley, paprika

Hobo stew: ground beef, Veg-all, cream of mushroom, seasoning

I’ll probably bring couscous next time. We also picked up some fresh corn at the local grocery store and cooked that on the fire too. One night my cousin made Italian sausage with caramelized onions and bell peppers. I brought plenty of craft beer.

Traverse City is nearby so we took a day trip there. Unfortunately not cherry season, so we couldn’t go cherry picking. The first pub we tried for lunch didn’t want to set up an outside table for Ana. We tried a few other places and ended up across the street at Union Tap and Grill.

ControversiAle from Shorts Brewery was so delicious I had a second, to make sure it was reproducible.

https://www.shortsbrewing.com/beers/controversiale/

The fried pickle appetizer was a hit.  Sweet pickle, cheese, wrapped in ham, then deep fried in beer batter. My Ruben sandwich was OK. Their homemade chips (not fries for my British friends) were pretty good. My wife thought that the lobster roll sandwich was too rich so we passed it down the table after I helped finish some of it.

Mission Pointe Lighthouse and Hessler Log cabin was the next stop. A storm had gone through a few days earlier so there were tons of trees and power lines down. Sleeping Bear Dunes was hit hard. We would have been staying there if it weren’t booked when we tried making reservations, several months in advance.

The next day we went canoeing along the Platte River to Sleeping Bear Dune. We tipped over when I was trying to keep us ‘docked’ at a rest stop. Ana made it very unstable as she moved around, sometimes rapidly. My sister’s boyfriend also fell in when they ran into a log. He tried to push away from it.

On the last day we just went hiking around the campgrounds. We decided not to swim any of the time there because of Swimmer’s Itch. There’s a parasite that enters the lakes via bird poo. When the parasite enters a snail, only there can it reproduce. Since it reproduces in snails, you are more likely to get it in shallow water. The parasite can’t infect humans but you can get a nasty rash from it. There are some species that can infect dogs so we decided no swimming for us or Ana. You can read more here.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/swimmers-itch/basics/definition/con-20030150

http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/swimmersitch/biology.html

Heterobilharzia americana

http://www.capcvet.org/capc-recommendations/canine-schistosomiasis-heterobilharzia-americana

Sadly my Exploding Kittens arrive the day we were driving to Interlochen, MI.