No long travel was scheduled today which was nice because we are still recovering from our impoverishing experience yesterday followed by minor hangovers today. I cooked us a bacon/sausage/tater/egg scramble and we worked on our hangovers with a light application of coffee and Irish Cream followed by Mimosas with breakfast. It was shaping up to be a great day.
We hopped into Charlotte and started north up the beach road from our campground to a neat little town called Pentwater. Strangely, Peggy suggested I get the Gas Buddy app running while we were in a town and damned if we didn’t find the cheapest diesel I have ever put in the tank of our faithful F-250 and the station was less than 5 miles away. To make things better, the tank was low so we got to buy a whole bunch of diesel cheap. We wandered around a bit near MI-31 before mysteriously finding ourselves again entering Pentwater except this time we approached from a different direction.
Pentwater is located right along the edge of a little finger bay that extends east from the east shore of Lake Michigan and it is very pretty. They have neat parks along the shoreline through Pentwater but parking is a bit iffy in the two-block downtown section. Pentwater serves a big community of homes around the finger bay and it appears most of the lake-edge property owners are quite affluent because the place is liberally sprinkled with very nice houses and lots of pleasure boats docked behind them.
From Pentwater we went back south on the beach road until we arrived in Silver Creek, a town in the middle of a state park with the same name. It is a pretty town with big houses, too. To go into the state park lands, however, you must cough up $9 for a day pass. We found great views throughout the area, including a beautiful lighthouse, without being required to park in any state lots. Peg steered us home from there so we could take a hike within our own park. We took a little stroll down to the 200 foot wide section of shoreline the RV park owns along Lake Michigan. The lake water was very clear near the shore and a great shade of blue in the deeper sections. Looking at the lake here appears a lot like looking out at the Sea of Cortez in Cabo San Lucas. Very nice. The water in Lake Michigan right now is only about 20 degrees cooler than the water in Cabo in December so swimming might be a tad chilly here. We saw lots of beachgoers but few swimmers. There is no surfing since they have no waves. It is really kind of boring compared to going to a real beach but it is the best they have around here and the folks in this area turn out on the sand in droves.