We left Indiana Dunes and made it as far as Battle Creek, MI, on our way to Lansing, Michigan’s capital. We found a friendly Walmart, and looked to see if there was anything else to see while we were in the Lansing area. We found that there was - our good friend Beth, who traveled to horse shows with us, met up with me when I’d go to Florida in the winter, and who was a most excellent house and farm sitter when we went away when we lived in NY. She’s now married and has a son named Declan - he’ll spell it for you if you want - and lives about 15 minutes outside of Lansing. I texted her in a bit of a panic because we wanted to drop in with no warning since we hadn’t realized how close we were, but she immediately got back to me and assured me that she’d love to see us. The only downside was that her wife Nicole had just left for a dog show in Pennsylvania so we didn’t get to meet her, but we had lunch with Beth and Declan at Horrocks, which is a really cool nursery/restaurant/super market/all purpose country store. We figured out that we hadn’t seen each other in at least 10 years, but we picked right up where we left off, as good friends do. We hung around long enough for Declan to show Tom all of his favorite toys, but then had to say goodbye and take the short drive into Lansing.
Like many of the Midwest capitals, Lansing is plunked in the middle of farmland, and while Beth warned us that we might hit a little traffic because it was getting later in the afternoon, it turned out that it really was just a *little* traffic. We easily found a place to park on a street just a couple of blocks from the capitol, and walked the dogs to the building. Initially, we didn’t think much of the surroundings, but we realized we had approached from the backside, and the front is a raised plaza over the streets which we had unknowingly parked under. We ended up taking a longer walk than we had anticipated because the raised plaza extends three or four blocks from the capitol.
We left Lansing, heading towards our next National Park, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We had looked online for a place to camp near the park, but couldn’t find anything, free or not. So, we stopped about an hour southeast of the park at the Marzinski Trailhead on some national forest land. It was a free campground like those we found in California, with spacious campsites with picnic tables and fire rings. We had a little scare when we first pulled in and it said camping was by reservation only, but when I got on the reservations.gov website I found that most of the sites were open, and were in fact free. Only one other site of the 19 campsites was taken when we got there, and one other group pulled in after us, but at the end of the day only three of the sites were occupied. And, the one site which had been marked on the website as reserved remained empty. I’m not quite sure what the point is of asking people to make reservations for free campsites since there’s no penalty if you book a site and don’t show up and keep someone else from using the space, but I guess the government will have to figure that out. The website also didn’t let us mark the site we occupied as taken, so I expect some problems will arise when the area starts to get busy. But, it worked out fine for us and we had a nice hike and a quiet evening before heading for Sleeping Bear Dunes in the morning.
