Our Summer Adventures Part 1: Traverse City, Michigan

We had an amazing summer this year. Last year, we had just gotten home from China and were busy adjusting, not sleeping, and taking Selah to many, many doctors’ appointments. This summer, we decided that we were going to have some family adventures. We’ve always loved traveling, but never got to do much of it before due to our strict budget before having kids so we could pay off our student loans. Now that we have three little kids, we assumed that traveling (at least international travel) was off the table. We’ve always wanted to visit Europe and Israel, especially. But then we realized how much there is to see in America that we’ve never seen. God has blessed America with some INCREDIBLE beauty! So, we made two goals for our family. First, before the kids are all out of the house after finishing college, we want to visit all 50 states with them. Second, we want to attempt to see each of the 59 national parks in the U.S. The U.S. National Parks are absolutely amazing! They’re gorgeous, clean, and the staff are so helpful and educational. We think it’s a perfect way to travel the U.S. over the next few years.  We’re also going to try to see as many of the 417 national park sites that we can. These include more than just “National Parks,” but also National Historical Sites, National Seashores, National Military Parks, and many others. They are all amazing, but 417 is quite a lofty goal for us, so we’ll just try to see as many as we can. To help reach our goal within our budget, we started renovating a small pop-up camper to take with us on our travels. We loved working on this project, and we are so excited to camp at the national parks we visit. Just don’t laugh at us when you see us pulling a camper with a minivan.  

We had lots of stops on our big family road trip this summer. First, we drove through Michigan, with a stop in Ann Arbor to visit Dan’s cousin. We continued all the way up to Traverse City, Michigan, where we fell in love with the town, the food, Lake Michigan, the ice cream, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
 
On our first full day in Traverse City, we drove to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. It was gorgeous, and the kids had so much fun climbing up the dunes and playing in the sand. It was amazing to see the three of them start to develop a sense of adventure. There were beautiful views at the top of Lake Michigan. After spending a few hours there playing in the sand and driving along the scenic loop, we drove to a little town called Empire, where we heard there was a nice beach on Lake Michigan. We had a picnic on the beach, and then we spent the rest of the day there. This beach was quite honestly one of the nicest beaches I have ever been to. The water was clean and clear, the sand was beautiful, and there was even a playground on the beach for the kids! We all had fun searching for petoskey stones, which are an amazing kind of fossilized stone that is only found in the area. We found a few and they are now treasured possessions. We had an amazing dinner in downtown Traverse City and what we still consider the best ice cream of our lives at a little place called Milk and Honey. We were sad to leave Traverse City after a few days, and it’s one of those places where we know we’ll be back! We had quite a few more adventures on our first annual epic road trip, but I’ll share those in another post. I hope you got to experience some of God’s beautiful creation this summer, too!