Between Lindsey's wedding, our trip to Michigan to visit my cousins and Girl Scout activities, October has been such a busy month that I'm terribly behind in my blogging. Even though I've been behind in documenting everything here, I've still been taking lots of photos, so it's just a matter of getting them uploaded.
This week, we took a drive to northern Michigan to visit my cousins Noreen and Nick. We stayed at their house which is located near the city of Charlevoix. As it so happened, the weekend of our visit was Charlevoix's annual Apple Festival.
Charlevoix is a resort town with lots of quaint shops and restaurants. In the past, Noreen has sent me gifts from American Spoon, so it was really neat to see it in person!
In the middle of Charlevoix is Round Lake. During the festival, craft and food vendors line the park around the lake.
This autumn decorated entrance way to one of the shops really caught my eye!
Right across the way from it was a petting zoo filled with these crazy goats. I thought for sure that were going to knock over the fence to get to that boy's ice cream cone!
A little local flavor. I'll have to look up how to do that. If Mark grows pumpkins next year, maybe we could try out our own designs!
And of course there were plenty of apples to be had.
We had dutch apple pie, apple fritters, apple donuts, and Mark bought some specialty variety apples because he is an apple connoisseur.
These two cutey Boston Terriers are locals.
I loved the quotes on the windows of this bar, especially the one by WC Fields: "I don't drink water. It rusts pipes and fish make love in it." That certainly puts it in perspective...eww.
After tasting their awesome free samples of pumpkin pie and caramel corn flavored taffy, we stopped into this old fashioned candy store. I was only planning on buying a half pound, but since Lauren kept putting more and more into my basket, we ended up with a pound and a half! It's a good thing that I love taffy.
During our down time, we enjoyed relaxing around the house and taking walks throughout their property. With the exception of some morning drizzle, we had absolutely gorgeous weather during our stay. It really made these photos!
Mark and Lauren brought their mitts and played catch.
I wonder if Nick knows how many pine trees that they own? I will have to ask him. I now understand why he cuts his own Christmas tree every year!
We took a walk up to the top part of their street so that we could see...
...Lake Michigan in the distance.
At this point I will note that the foliage that I saw during that trip was probably the most breathtaking that I'd seen in my life. I wish that I had taken more photos of the leaves, but majority of the time I was leaf peeping from the inside of a speeding car - lol.
One the second day we took a trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which was voted the Most Beautiful Place in America by Good Morning America in 2012. And once you see it, you'll agree.
The sign speaks for itself. The park rangers have had to rescue folks who made the trip down the dunes, but couldn't make it back up.
The water was so clear and blue - it was like the Caribbean!
Here's Mark and Lauren contemplating the walk down.
That's about as far as they got.
Of course, we had to take some family photos!
Nick and Noreen were such fabulous hosts. Everything that we did was wonderful and right up our alley. We can't wait to go back and explore more of Michigan!
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