Road Trip 2017, Day 9?

It’s getting more and more difficult to figure out which day it is! That’s a good thing, but it’s just going to make reentry to work that much more difficult next Wednesday.

Today, I decided I wanted to see the Lake Huron coast in dry weather, so I headed northeast from Frankenmuth and followed the coastline around the “thumb” of Michigan until it came time to just head to my destination for the day, Battle Creek. Along the way, I found a couple of nice little places to stop and get some photos even though the weather was not the most wonderful.

The first was a tiny roadside park and beach where I also met a new friend (he’s really not more than 6 or 8 inches long):

Along this part of the coast, lake access is obviously at a premium! There’s almost nowhere for the public to get to the lake as everything is solid cottages or, in the case of there being too little land between the highway and the lake, private beaches for the houses on the other side of the road. But every once in a long while, there was a little tiny park like this one.

Even nicer was a county park in St. Austin which had a large parking lot, play area, a large beach, and lots of boardwalks which included many built-in benches and picnic tables:

There was even a lighthouse a ways out in the lake; the first photo is the wide view, and the second is courtesy of my 250mm telephoto lens with the photo cropped:

My late lunch / early dinner for the day was at the Dark Horse Brewery in Marshall MI, followed by a short drive to Battle Creek and a night’s stay at a Red Roof Inn. Tomorrow, it’s back into Ohio for a couple of days!