Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Getting caught up and planning fall travels

Site 509 Holiday Shores

With Bryce all settled at MSU, it was time for Tom and I to get back into our empty-nest travel mode.  When we started making our plans a few weeks ago, we were having a difficult time finding a campsite for Labor Day weekend, so when we found a campground about 30 minutes east of Lansing that had availability, we went ahead and booked a week to get us through the holiday weekend.

Holiday Shores RV Park is in Durand, MI, about 15 miles west of Flint on I-69.  It’s not a location where we would normally plan on camping, but it’s a really nice park.

It’s a very large park, with primarily seasonal sites and a fair number of park models, but there are a good number of sites available for daily and weekly campers, and those are mostly new sites in the expanded areas of the park.

Nice sites and nice wide roads

The area we were in was almost all RVs, the sites were spacious and the facilities were good, and there was a nice common area with firepits between our row and the row that backed up to us.

WE met lots of nice people, and it seemed like the seasonal community had lots of activities throughout the summer.  The only negatives that I saw were that cable and internet are only available to seasonal campers, and there is no pool.  Otherwise, it was a really nice park.

Lots of Spartan fans here, too!

Sparty

We did lots of walking and bike riding, and enjoyed several beautiful sunsets.

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The sites on the western area of the park are surrounded by the golf course.

There are several “lakes” within the park, with the original section surrounding the largest lake where the beach is located.

Sunset over the lake

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On one of our walks, we spotted a little library between two sites . . .

Little Library

and a “reading room” next door!

Reading Room

Smile

While I was catching up on work after my vacation week, I put Tom to work planning our route and making a few reservations along the way.  We also solidified our winter plans, so now we have our next 4 stops planned, and our end point . . . we just have to fill in the middle!

We’ll start our travels in Canada, then upstate New York, including 2 weeks in the Finger Lakes area.  Next we head toward the coast so we can fill in the rest of the east coast on our map (we need Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware), and then end up in the Norfolk area to spend about a month with Nicolas before heading down to Florida.

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We plan on spending December somewhere on the middle Atlantic coast (if it’s still there after Irma!!), before heading down to the Keys where we’ll be volunteering at the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge on Big Pine Key for January – March.

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We’ve never been to the Keys before, so we’re really looking forward to that!

With some progress made, Tom took a break from trip planning and did a little cleaning of the RV and Jeep . . . and Casey!

It relaxes her!She loves having a spa day!

Casey getting brushed

We also got ourselves prepared for our trip into Canada – thinning out our alcohol and finishing up all our fresh veggies and fruit.  I  don’t think my refrigerator has ever been this empty before!

We did make a Walmart run to stock up on “snacks” and paper products, and spent one day exploring Durand – what a cute little town – that’ll be a separate blog post.

A couple more beautiful sunsets before we leave Michigan!

Sunset_August 30th

Sunset_September 3rd

3 comments:

  1. WOW...Sweet gig in the KEYS!!! Will be interested to hear how you like it. We should be at Huntington Beach during December. Give us a shout if you head this way.

    Happy Trails and Safe Travels.......

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  3. Even though we are heading to Arizona this year we absolutely loved our time in the Keys and so will you. You'll be just up the road from the No-Name Pub. Best pizza we've ever had.
    Be Safe and Enjoy!

    It's about time.

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