Summer Fun at Silver Lake

From Empire, we travelled south on US-31 along the coast for about 100 miles.  Our next destination was Silver Creek RV Resort at Silver Lake.  This is another of our favorites – the kids especially like going to the dunes and all of the summer “hangouts” in town

We were on site 100 – a nice site at the end of the road by the pool.

We’ve always thought that these would be great sites to have – backing in is a piece of cake because you have the whole side road to work with – but as we found out this week, the wifi is pretty weak on these sites.  We’ve been having connection issues all week, and we have almost no Verizon signal in the campground at all.

Oh well, it’s been beautiful all week, so who needs to be online.

As we walked through the RV Park, we thought we must have walked in a circle without realizing it . . .

but wait a minute . . . we don’t have a red Jeep! 

Yep, it’s another X-Aire . . . not something we see everyday!  We met the owners later in the week, and had a great visit, touring each others’ rigs . . . they are the same year, so they are a lot the same, even though the floorplan is slightly different.

We had beautiful weather all week, and were able to spend time at the beach, where the water was freezing cold still,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and in the pool, where the water was warm!

 

 

 

We also visited some of our favorite Silver Lake locations – Little Sable Lighthouse,         

the Pizza Factory for dinner one night, ice cream at Tasty Creations and the new Cosmic Candy Company!

All the boys’ favorites!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yep, it was a perfect summer weekend!

Our last stop was Craig’s Cruisers . . .

because we can’t ever come to Silver Lake (or any other vacation destination) without a trip to the go-cart track!

Bryce rounded up some friends to go with them (because it’s always more fun with a group!), and they all had a blast!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The kids had fun, and it was a great way to end the week! 

We also had a couple of new experiences here at Silver Lake, but those will get their own blog posts!

Tomorrow we head back to our old hometown, and we’ll stay 2 weeks at Haas Lake Campground -- the same campground where we spent our very first month of fulltiming.

More Silver Lake fun

We’ve been back “home” for almost a week now, and we’ve been busy with family visits, doctor & dentist appointments, and getting ready for another school year.

We picked a different campground as our home base this year, Camp Lord Willing in Monroe, MI, and it’s very nice.  The campground is open year-round, and there are quite a few long-term residents, but the RVs and sites are well-kept, and it’s very peaceful and quiet.

 

Tom is especially happy that the roads are all paved!  It’s also a little more centrally-located between our families, and an easy drive for me to go to work.  It’ll be a good place to call home for several weeks while we take care of business.

Before we left Silver Lake, though, we had a couple more days of fun.

Sunday was supposed to be rainy and cool, but again the weather forecasters were way off, and it turned out to be a beautiful day.  We took a drive down to the Lake Michigan beach to walk the beach and see the lighthouse.

Apparently there was recently a ruling in Michigan that allows homeowners on lakes claim the beach as private, and on this stretch of sand the homeowners were taking advantage of it and had set up signs stating that the public was not allowed to walk on the sand; we had to stay on the edge of the water.  Once we arrived back on state park property, we could walk in the sand again!

 

Along the way, we watched a guy kite sailing along the shore.  It was a great day for it, with a nice strong wind off the lake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we had known it was going to be as nice as it was, we could have brought our lunches and had a picnic at the beach.  Instead, after getting the kids to pose for a couple pictures,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

we headed back to the RV Park for lunch.  After lunch and some relaxing time, we gave in to the kids and rode bikes into town for some go-carting and ice cream.

Even the big kids had to get into the competition!

The ride ended way too soon, but the kids all had fun!

We finished up the day with some time at the pool, and a campfire in the evening.  We also had a surprise meeting with The Boyink’s, another family living an RV lifestyle.  We’ve been following each other’s blogs, with a common background of being from Michigan, but had never met in person.  They just happened to be in the RV Park visiting family who we were parked across from, and we recognized them as they walked down the road!  What a small world!

Our friends had to leave on Monday (back to work and school!), but we had a couple extra days to relax.  The rain and cold front finally arrived, and the RV Park quickly emptied out.  Our neighbor in the park was going up on the dunes and offered to take Nick & Bryce with him and his daughter, so that was fun for them . . . they said it was fairly tame up on the dunes, but chilly!  They had a great time, though!

On Tuesday, we were back to beautiful weather, and we took a drive to nearby Pentwater,

where most of the shops were closed (recovering from the busy holiday weekend, I guess!), but we managed to visit our favorite shop in town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From downtown, we walked to the beach at Mears State Park.

It was a quiet day at the beach, with just a few dogs swimming in the water,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and a few boats out on the water.

We walked out to the end of the pier, where nick and Bryce climbed on the rocks . . .

 mermaid rocks, I guess . . .

 

 

then we took a walk through the campground to check it out.

The views from the sites are certainly beautiful, but the sites are really just parking spots, and they are pretty small . . . too tight for a big rig, I’m afraid.  I guess we’ll stick with the Silver Creek RV Resort when we want to be in this area, and make the drive up to Pentwater.

On the way back to the campground, we stopped for one last view of the sand dunes.

It was a great way to end our Labor Day weekend holiday, back home in Michigan!

Typical camping activities

For us, besides swimming in the pool and soaking up some much-needed sun, we never can pass up a trip to the local go-cart track and ice cream shop.

The big place here in western Michigan is Craig’s Cruisers, and there’s one in Silver Lake – conveniently!  This year they added a “zip-line”, and the kids had to try it out – although not really much of a thrill ride!

See – they are not strapped into a harness like you would expect from a zip-line – it’s more like a cable car ride. 

Here they are on the ride back down – OK, did that, no need to ride it again – can we go on the go-carts now??!!

As usual, the go-carts prove to be much more fun and exciting . . .

. . . for all the kids – the young ones, and the “not-so-young” ones, too!!

After a couple of trips around the go-cart track, it’s over to the Whippy Dip for ice cream – YUM!  Once everybody was cooled off, we headed to the lighthouse beach catch the sunset over Lake Michigan. 

It was a beautiful evening, and LOTS of people had the same idea!  While we waited for the sun to go down, the kids played in the sand,

and in the water!

Lake Michigan is still a little chilly, but considering how early in the summer it is, it’s really quite warm!!

As the sun faded, I got the boys to pose for a picture for me,

and caught a couple of nice sunset pics, too!

Last Day in Pigeon Forge

Monday was another beautiful day in Pigeon Forge, TN.  We had sunny skies and temps in the 60s.  After getting some work and school done in the morning, we took a drive into town to see what was going on.  The crowds had mostly left, and it was amazingly easy to drive from one end of town to the other!

The boys were anxious to drive go-carts, so we decided on “The Track”.

We bought a package deal, and Nicolas and Bryce made a beeline for Wild Woody!

After one race (when Nicolas had a dud of a car!), they decided that they needed more competition and convinced Tom to join them – not that they needed to twist his arm much!

The boys sure love their go-carts!!

After depleting all their tickets, we took a drive through Gatlinburg, but didn’t really see anything worth stopping for, so we headed back to the campground.  We were leaving in the morning, and there was a pretty good chance of rain overnight, so we packed up the bikes, chairs and grill.  Tom and I got some work done in the evening, and again on Tuesday morning before we finished packing up before the 11:00 am check-out time.  Of course, the weathermen were wrong, and we didn’t get any rain overnight or Tuesday – in fact, it was a beautiful day with sunny skies and temps in the 80s! 

With the possibility of severe storms on Tuesday night, we decided to play it safe and go to a location we were familiar with, and that we knew had paved roads and grassy sites (no mud!).  So, we headed north on I-75, and after an easy 3-hour drive we arrived at the Kentucky Horse Park just north of Lexington.  We paid $52.60 for 2 nights (with AAA discount), plus $9.95 for internet, and $5.75 for a bundle of firewood, and we settled into our site.

Site number 169 is on the outer loop, backed up to the horse park.