Today, Dad and I drove up north for the day to take pictures. I am so thankful for the great weather we had. It was warm and sunny, and there were light clouds in the sky. Just enough to make our pictures interesting. We left at 6:30 am and headed up to Holland. We didn't see much for tulips around town, so we continued on to Ludington. When we got there, we headed to the state park. Since it is before Memorial Day, a lot of stuff was closed up. And we could see they were making preparations for the soon-to-be-here summer crowd. They were actually blowing leaves and picking them up in the campground. Man, Jon and I struggle to get our leaves up out of our yard every fall. I can't imagine getting all the leaves up in a forest! We parked near the entrance of the state park and made the 1.8 mile hike up to Big Sable Lighthouse. It's kind of a boring hike up a gravel/sandy path surrounded by dunes. When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures of the lighthouse from the beach. Then we trekked up to the top of the lighthouse. It was very windy at the top, but a gorgeous view. On the hike back to the car, as we were walking, a turkey comes trucking out of the tree line onto the path in front of us and then takes off flying. It was pretty funny, he looked like he was running away from someone like he was in trouble.
We were starving for lunch after our morning exercise and went to Sportsman's Irish Pub for lunch. This Irish pub in the middle of Michigan was loaded with Notre Dame memorabilia. I talked to the waitress and asked her if the owner would mind hanging up a matted framed picture I took of Notre Dame. She said she would love it. So I'm pretty excited that one of my pictures will be hanging up in the bar. I know just what picture I'm going to send. Actually, my parents are going back up there at the end of the month and will be taking it with them.
After lunch, we drove to Little Sable Lighthouse just south of Pentwater. This one you can drive right up to and not have to walk 2 miles to get to. The lighthouse tours don't open until the end of May, so we didn't get to go up in this one. While Dad was taking lots of pictures of the lighthouse, I walked around and looked for interesting things to take pictures of on the sand. I was looking for some Macro shots to take.
On the way home, we stopped in Holland again to make sure we didn't miss any opportunities in tulip shots. We didn't. Most of the heads of the tulips had already died and fallen off. We had a pretty warm winter and an early spring, so they ran their course rather quickly.
