White Lake, Michigan

September 18 - 20, 2007

We left Ludington early (for us that means around 10:30am) because we knew it would be a long trip to White Lake, Michigan. Earlier in the trip, in Leland and in Canada, we had met Bill and Evelyn on their sailboat Inua. They were at White Lake waiting to get hauled. We got a slip at Crosswinds Marine at White Lake.

We had a very nice visit with them (and the rest of the people on our dock at Crosswinds) on Saturday night. We provided cookies for the Saturday dockside gathering. Thus making up for tormenting the whole dock on Friday night when Bernie baked chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies. She didn't realize that all the people from the neighboring boats were relaxing on the dock and could smell the cookies baking. She didn't hear them begging for cookies because she had the stereo cranked pretty loud. We also rode in a car to go to dinner at Hobo's Tavern in Muskegon. This was the first car trip for us since Drummond Island (before that, our last car trip was June 11.)

White Lake is right by the Hart-Montague Bicycle Trail. Hart-Montague is a 22 mile (44, round trip) bike trail and is notable as the first Michigan rail trail. It's a great trail - paved all the way with grades instead of steep hills. It runs through several towns including New Era, Rothbury, Shelby, and Mears. Each town has a small rest area for bikers (and there are many benches and picnic tables along the way).

New Era's stop is by their Elm Tree Project. One of their schools is maintaining young elm trees that are resistant to dutch elm disease in an attempt to reintroduce the trees to the area.

Shelby has an exercise station route off the bicycle path. We learned from this section that Bernie can't do chin-ups, cheats at push-ups and the horizontal ladder, and is a humorous sight to see doing the parallel bars. While Phil has her beat, hands up, at the horizontal ladder, she wins at all the flexibility and stretching stations. (No Phil, it doesn't count if you bend your knees while doing the toe touches.)




And you need to do those exercise stations because Mears has a great little bakery called Morat's Bakery. While they are apparently known for the muffin bread, we found their Turtle Cinnamon Rolls (Cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting topped with choc0late, caramel and pecans) well worth the 21 miles it took to bike there (and the 21 miles back).

There's also a large dairy, with ice cream, just off the trail near New Era. So, when you need that last burst of energy to get back to White Lake, just pull in to Country Dairy and get some ice cream. Surely after close to 44 miles, you've worked off more than enough calories to balance the ice cream.

The trail extends into the White Lake area and there are several art statues off the trail here. These metal origami swans are called Lake Spirits.

Montague has a farmer's market on Saturdays in the summer. Of course Bernie ran over there bright and early. She got late season raspberries and blueberries, peaches and plums, and, much to her surprise, acorn and butternut squash. She's always thought of those as autumn vegetables. It can;t be autumn already, can it?