October 18 - Ludingtion, Michigan

It rained intermittently during the night but let off in the morning so we were not too cold while preparing the trailer and hooking it up for towing. Again it took us about an hour from getting out of bed to hitting the road, and I estimate that breakfast and morning ablutions required ½ hour while the preparing and hooking sequence required another ½ hour. In any event we started driving south from the “City of Traverse City” about 8:45 and the clouds gradually cleared during the drive, allowing the sun to shine on the trees and make their colors much more vibrant.

By the time we arrived at Ludington State Park, a bright sun was streaming down from a clear blue sky, so after parking the trailer and having lunch, we decided to do the Volksmarch in the town of Ludington. The starting point for this walk is the House of Flavors restaurant, which looked like a mighty fine place to eat before or after a walk. But we had just eaten back at camp, so we just signed up for the walk and started off on the first loop to the north. That loop curled back past the northern shore of the harbor and a breakwater that led out to the lighthouse at the harbor mouth.

Altho not part of the walk, we could not resist walking out to the lighthouse and taking a picture of it. There are many warning signs to deter people from walking out there, and I definitely would not do it in bad weather, but it is allowed “at your own risk”. Many folks were walking the approximately 1 km distance to the lighthouse—most of the folks were couples and most of the couples were holding hands so I guess this is either some kind of romantic spot or else they expected the surface to be really slippery. The lighthouse itself is curious in that the lower “deck” of it is shaped like the bow of a ship. I speculated to Monika that this design was to withstand the breaking waves in severe storms, but I really don’t know if that is the real reason or not. On the way back I was trying to take a good picture of the seagulls flying by, but they were frustratingly uncooperative. However, one was sitting nicely still, so I could at least take “sitting sea gull” pictures if not the “seagull in flight” picture.

Back on shore we continued on a trail along the harbor’s edge past the Coast Guard Station with its Halloween decorations (and an Airstream trailer!). In the distance we saw two lake steamers anchored—they have a characteristically bluff bow and stern for maximizing the cargo they can carry thru the locks between the lakes so they are readily recognizable. One of them might have been the “Beaver”, a car ferry across Lake Michigan that runs from Ludington, Michigan, over to Wisconsin, but I wasn’t sure. We passed the city marina, mostly empty as it was very late in the sailing season, and turned east on the main street thru the business section. This seemed to be a healthy downtown section for a small town that included nice stores and some, but not too many, tourist-oriented businesses.

At the far end of town we found the High School and curved back to the starting point. Here we “bent” the route a bit to make sure we saw all of the downtown section and get a feel for the city. All in all, we thought this was a nice, flat city walk with the lighthouse and harbor as the main points of interest. The walk out to the lighthouse is NOT part of the route and adds 2 km, but if the weather is calm and clear it might be worth it, particularly if you like lighthouses.

After the short drive back to camp, we had a light supper and settled in for our normal evening activities, but we interrupted the festivities for a bit to walk up to the top of a nearby sand dune and watch the sun set over Lake Michigan. The dunes here are very large and extensive—hard to walk on but well worth the effort in this case because the sunset was an absolutely a brilliant symphony of red clouds, blue sky, and white contrails arching overhead. Wow. To top it off, a lake freighter was passing offshore just as the sun went down and I took several shots of the freighter in font of the setting sun with the camera set on 10x zoom. We’ll have to see how that all comes out. There was literally a crowd of spectators watching the sunset from the dunes and I almost expected them to break out in applause at the end. I later was chatting with one of them and he described it as a “kick-butt sunset”, a perhaps mixed metaphor but an appropriate description nonetheless.