Lake Michigan Love Affair

Chapter 11 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our kids playing on the shores of Lake Michigan during a cold Fourth of July weekend.

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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It really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Jeff and I have a mutual love affair with Lake Michigan. After all, our love story started on Lake Michigan, when Jeff took me to the fireworks at Silver Beach in St. Joseph, Michigan for our first date. It was the Fourth of July, one month after our high school graduation and a mere three weeks after mutual friends introduced us to each other. After getting separated during the actual fireworks display and spending the entire show in different locations in the parking lot, we walked up and down the beach for hours. The soft, cold sand squished through our toes as we waited for the endless line of cars to finally clear out so that Jeff could take me home. 

No matter how far we moved away from home, no trip to visit our parents was complete without at least a drive-by past the lake. And I’m a lake girl, through and through. I spent much of childhood proud of the fact that I was born in Southern California, trying to wear my native birth and first year of life like a badge. But I wasn’t Pacific Coast raised, I was Michigan raised. My first memories of water were brief moments in Lake Huron when visiting my grandparents in Ontario or traveling with my family (and half of the Detroit metropolitan population) to Lake St. Clair during unbearable summer heat waves. As much as I may appreciate a beautiful ocean sunset photograph, I don’t appreciate salt water and I don’t seek out time near ocean water, a fact that drove Jeff crazy when we went to Hawaii to celebrate our 20^th wedding anniversary.

But of all the lakes I have visited over the years, my family’s move to Southwest Michigan when I was sixteen instilled a love for Lake Michigan that continues to grow despite the miles of separation over the years. And the lake has played a role throughout our camping history, beginning with that very first camping dry run when we needed to try out our new equipment. The park for us to get to, Warren Dunes State Park, served as our host for our tent’s virgin camping trip.

From the moment we met, Jeff was sharing stories of camping as a child. While my childhood memories involve visiting family all over the country (and occasional trips to Canada to visit my grandparents when they were living in Ontario), staying in the houses of strangers, and random sightseeing stops between those visits, his childhood memories consist of weeks and weekends of visiting state parks in Michigan and Indiana, the games he and his family played to ward off rain related boredom, and sightseeing around those state parks. 

A couple of those state parks are right along the shores of Lake Michigan. On one particular camping trip, well before we had children, when we managed to reserve a spot at Grand Haven State Park in Michigan. Our camp site was right on the beach, and the first night that we were there a quick thunderstorm came up off of the lake. We had never experienced water in our tent before, but the water came down so hard and fast that we didn’t know what hit us. We stayed in bed, convinced that we would wake up to wet sand surrounding the tent and that was it, but when we got out of the air mattress the next morning, our feet landed in puddles of water and wet sand. We continued camping through the weekend, walking along the boardwalk, riding our bikes and getting ice cream along the way. Jeff, determined to relive his childhood with a visit to the Grand Haven Musical Fountain, swallowed his disappointment that his wife’s first experience with the nightly light and water show was Sacred Music Night. 

During our summer with the Roo, we took the hybrid up to Michigan for a trip to Warren Dunes. Visiting Lake Michigan was nothing new for our kids, but we hadn’t camped near the lake. Now that we had dived back into camping, we looked forward to the opportunity to take our kids to Michigan with the freedom to stay in our own quarters instead of choosing which parents we were going to stay with.