{"id":1573,"date":"2015-06-25T22:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T22:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2018-09-08T02:08:37","modified_gmt":"2018-09-08T02:08:37","slug":"thursday-june-25-2015-leelenau-peninsula-traverse-city-mi-136-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/25\/thursday-june-25-2015-leelenau-peninsula-traverse-city-mi-136-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, June 25, 2015 , Leelenau Peninsula \/ Traverse City, MI (136 miles)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We had another completely fabulous day! We set out after a decent hotel
\nbreakfast (oatmeal, cereal) and stopped at a grocery store for a small
\npicnic meal for later. Then we headed west out of Traverse City to the
\nSleeping Bear National Lakeshore. What a wonderful place! We started with
\na scenic drive that had two absolutely breathtaking overlooks–one at the
\ntop of one of the HUGE sand dunes that this park is famous for. They go
\ndown 300-400 feet in a very steep incline to this absurdly clear, tropically
\nlight blue water, and no photos will do them full justice. It was so
\nbeautiful, standing there high up with the Manitou islands and otherwise
\njust endless lake in front of us. We also saw a lake in the making–all
\nthese little lakes directly inland dot the Leelanau peninsula that we are
\non, and they get created when a sandbar gradually closes off a bay or a part
\nof a bay. This is why we drove across so many little land bridges
\nyesterday, with Lake Michigan on one side and a little lake on the other.
\nAfter the scenic drive, we did the “must-do” thing, the “Old Faithful” of
\nthe park–we hiked up the big dune in the center of the park (not near the
\nshore”), which was really the only busy art of the park–almost everywhere
\nelse, we ran into at most 20 people. The Dune Climb again defies photos in
\nterms of scale–it’s a HUGE dune and a hard climb up, but it’s fun to get to
\nthe benches on top and then run back down the enormous sloping hill of fine\u00a0white sand–and watch the five-year olds that manage it effortlessly!<\/p>\n

The dune climb was exhausting, but we then took one more small hike before\u00a0lunch–from the Maritime Museum, which explains the early coastguard rescues\u00a0on this coast–to Sleeping Bear Point, a 1.4 round-trip trail across dunes\u00a0to a very quiet beach with a bottom-up view of those enormous sand slopes at\u00a0this coast. We ran into a park volunteer who was monitoring the rare bird\u00a0species that is currently having their young here–the Great Lakes piping\u00a0plover, an endangered species of which there are only abut 70 breeding pairs\u00a0left–and 24 of them in this park (as of last year’s nesting statistics). \u00a0She showed us images of what they look like and pointed out their nesting\u00a0area, and a few minutes later we saw two different moms and chicks zipping\u00a0around on the beach ! The chicks are no bigger than a wren and even the mom\u00a0is teeny, and their camouflage is amazing, so there were very hard to spot. \u00a0But Mark caught a couple on camera, so we were excited!<\/p>\n

After a quick visit to the maritime museum, complete with old rescue boats
\nand cork-based life vests, we had out picnic lunch, and then headed for
\nanother point on this bay, Pyramid Point, with another little hike through
\nforest and then sand dunes. This was another high-up, don’t walk down or
\nyou’ll never get back up dune, and we also saw a beautiful yellow monarch in\u00a0these wild lilies at look like fire lilies to me. Then we left the park
\nafter a brief visit to a long, narrow beach, where there were in face tiny
\nshells, so I was wrong about the ocean-lake difference in that respect. We
\ncontinued along the coast up the Leelenau Peninsula, up to a lighthouse in a
\nstate park at the very tip, called Grand Traverse lighthouse. But there
\nwasn’t much park around it, and it was a bit too touristy for my taste–we
\ndidn’t tour the lighthouse because they wanted to charge us, and I think the
\nwhole “lighthouse collecting” business, where many road trippers try to
\nvisit as many lighthouses as possible is s bit silly.<\/p>\n

We continued down the coast, catching many glimpses of the lake between
\nbuilding or through the trees, and stopped at a public access spot to see
\nthe very clear division between a light and a dark blue layer in the lake
\nmore clearly. A guy who was just getting his boat out of the lake confirmed
\nout hunch that the lake drops off very sharply, from 15 feet to about 50
\nfeet, and that causes the very different color “lines” in this super clear
\nwater. We returned to Traverse City, at the end of the peninsula, around 5
\npm, and found the downtown area, around Front street. It was very nice, not
\njust tourist-oriented, although that’s clearly part of its clientele–but it
\nwas more Pearl Street in Boulder or the Haymarket in Lincoln than Estes Park\u00a0or Bar Harbor–lots of restaurants and brew pubs, art galleries and fancy\u00a0clothes stores, but also food trucks at the end of downtown, a great old\u00a0movie theater, and an old canal between Front Street and actual Traverse\u00a0Bay. We found a pub with outdoor seating and had a fabulous , really fresh\u00a0pizza and an ice cream sandwich made by the locally famous ice cream\u00a0company, Moomers. It was yummy (cinnamon ice cream between oatmeal-raisin\u00a0cookies). We shared the dessert as well as the meal, so we felt very\u00a0moderate! We took a quick walk to the waterfront, but after a gorgeous,\u00a0mostly sunny day with almost no wind, it had gotten a bit chilly by then,\u00a0and we just headed home to our motel, with plans to shut up shop extra\u00a0early.<\/p>\n

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We had another completely fabulous day! We set out after a decent hotel breakfast (oatmeal, cereal) and stopped at a grocery store for a small picnic meal for later. Then we headed west out of Traverse City to the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. What a wonderful place! We started with a scenic drive that had … Continue reading “Thursday, June 25, 2015 , Leelenau Peninsula \/ Traverse City, MI (136 miles)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roadtrip2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1584,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions\/1584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}