In lieu of Italy, I spent a week in northern Michigan. Actually on the north-eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The area is nothing like Northern Ontario and the other Great Lakes. It has dunes, sandy beaches, resorts, cherry orchards, golf-courses and cultivated pine-groves. The image on the left is Dom, Alyssa, Mary and Daniel getting ready to climb the dune in the National Lakeshore Park.

It was a surprise to find National Lakeshore, I had no idea that the east coast of Lake Michigan is protected parkland. (In all the years that I’ve been traveling through Michigan, this is the first time that I ever visited the eastern shores of the Lake.)

I always assumed that Lake Michigan would be much like the other Great Lakes rocky and rugged. Instead it’s sand and gentle, rolling hills. It’s fields of sunflowers and beautifully manicured greens. It’s farmland and orchards. It’s the refuge of the car-manufacturing gentry escaping the industrial south for the dunes and shores of the “up-north”.