Visiting the Grand Traverse Bay Region

Photos from the Family Album

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is how the saying goes. The same goes for yours truly.

A main ‘go to’ place for a little R & R for my family and I over the years has been the Grand Traverse Bay Region in northwest Lower Michigan—Traverse City, Leelanau Peninsula, the Old Mission Peninsula, and the Sleeping Bears Dune towns of Glen Arbor and Empire as well as the sand dunes.

We’ve generally gone on President’s Day Weekend in February which coincides with our wedding anniversary (Feb. 16) and that was a day off when our son was in school and in mid-August or Labor Day Weekend.

I had first visited the area in 1973, joining my MSU college friend Zdan and his siblings and their entourage of friends on camping weekends at Interlochen State Park. I subsequently lived in Traverse City for parts of 1974 and 1975. It was the place where I resolved, come ‘hell or high water’ I was going to be a fulltime writer and somehow make a living at it. Well, the early going was not smooth sailing and running a weekly newspaper, as we have for the past 39 years, has had its moments, but I’ve been cobbling words together since that moment of determination, and paying the bills. It’s been a combination of newspaper journalism, social commentary, and personal reflections, with the latter two also falling under the category of essays.

Anyway, here are a few photos of our recent trips to the North Country.

Going from top left clockwise are Dawn and I at Empire with Lake Michigan in the background, the two of us kissing the moose at Sleder’s Tavern in TC on our 34th anniversary in 2019, snowshoeing at Mission Point Lighthouse Park at the tip of the Old Mission Peninsula (the 45th Parallel), Bradley, Lindsay and baby Mackenzie with us at the Northport State Park (the tip of Leelanau Peninsula) in the summer of 2022, and Mackenzie with her Grandpa Steve also at Northport.