A Moving Dune

By the time we got back to this sign on the way out the sand was covering up the DO NOT RUN line and it was hard to make out the "return climb is extremely exhausting" line.

Sand dunes are constantly in motion due to weather and land shifts and wave action. These dunes move 1-2 feet a year, I know, doesn't sound like much but look at these pictures. We were there in mid-late August. And the benches you see here were completely uncovered and usable not two weeks before.

This one was the least buried of all the benches we saw. We could only find the boardwalk in one place, way out at the end of the walk and then only for maybe 30-40 feet.

Couple of fun Vidoes

Here are a couple of videos from our trip, one of Autumn racing down the dune and one of her washing windows.

Rest of our Trip

We found a boat in the back shed that my brother built when he was probably 5 or so. Autumn had a great time pulling it around.

Here's a few pictures of daily life at our brown house. We borrowed a motor boat from the neighbors for a boat ride one day. Very exciting stuff! We went "fast fast way out to the blue".

Autumn helped wash the windows. They were pretty dirty on the outsides and after we cleaned we could see much better.

One day we drove M22 all the way up to the top of the peninsula and back down the other side. We were a bit worried on the northbound trip and being on the windward side it was pretty blustery and windy. When we rounded the top (stopping at the lighthouse there) and headed south along the lee side it was a completely different planet! You can see Autumn playing in Sutton's Bay and below that was about an hour before at our lunch at Peterson Park......completely different

Many days we hung out at our beach just playing in the water, digging in the sand, pulling fun and interesting things off the beach after winds blew them up. We found a towel, a bucket, a yard stick, some kind of handle for a boat rope, lots of drift wood and other things.

What a Cutie!

We interrupt this vacation log to bring you this picture of Autumn. It was snapped by someone from our church while we were all waiting at the staging area for the Burnsville Fire Muster Parade on Sunday the 12th.

Sleeping Bear Dunes

As is tradition we went to climb Sleeping Bear Dunes. Autumn looked at it from the car and thought she'd died and gone to heaven. She was so eager to get out of the car and climb and play in her big sandbox that she got tangled up in her seatbelts. As you can see below she was half way up before we were even at the foot. She ran all the way up without stopping, I swear it only took her 2 minutes. We walked across the top for a while but didn't attempt the 1.5 mile trek to Lake Michigan on the other side. "Why not?" you say? because a 1.5 mile hike is easy and fun, but when you do it across dunes......it takes hours.

Do you see what we found in the sand?

When we ran all the way down to the bottom we played in the sand for a while. Autumn had fun buryign our feet. Somehow Kurt really doesn't look much shorter!

Wipe Out!

See my footprints mom?

Two days before we were going to leave Autumn wanted to go to the big sandbox again. So we took her, I hadn't planned to climb the dratted thing again. She went half way up and down and half way up and down and played at the bottome (repeat a couple dozen times). The next time I looked up (and it couldn't have been more than 3-4 min) She was at the top!!!! Well, of course she couldn't hear me yelling to come down. So up I went after her, I couldn't trust her not to take off over the other hills on the top of the dunes. We stayed at the top for a bit, met people who were going further over when they past us. Autumn met a new friend who was all in pink and when she saw Autumn's "Boney" (fossil rex) she had to stop and talk dinosaurs with Autumn. They are about a month apart and I'm glad they understood each other because her grandparents and I only caught about 1 word in 8. Eventually we ran back down and headed home to have a picnic on the dock.