Why go to the ocean? It's salty and Michigan won't flood from global warming.

Steph likes sailboats

100% genuine beach bum

We spent the night at JD's parents house in Holland. Dan and Chris were gone for a couple days at a shooting competition up in Cadillac. Chris left us a nice note saying that we are welcome in her house, and Dan left a note saying that the guns are loaded. We slept the sleep of the truly weary and awoke refreshed and surprisingly early, about 930.

I forced Steph to take this picture for Jeanne.Elephants

JD's plan for the day was to go play on the beach, and we concurred. First we had to drive through Holland and hopefully pick up a volleyball for us kids to play with. Construction in town caused JD to be confused and the only sports store we could find didn't have a volleyball, so I made Stephanie take a picture of a local church as a consolation prize. We drove west and arrived at a giant traffic jam of people also heading to the beach. JD suggested we park on a side street, but I thought I saw a parking lot up ahead. I pulled into the parking lot only to discover it was gated, and then we were out of the line of cars heading into the beach, so I parked on the aforementioned sidestreet. This turned out to be a mistake. After walking for about 1/4 mile, traffic cleared up, and after walking another mile after that, we realized we should have parked a lot closer. After walking a mile after that, we arrived at the beach. (For those of you that are bad at math, that's a little over 2 miles)

The beach was huge, with clean white sand, and plenty of scantily clad people running around and having fun. The water was a very pleasant 74 degrees, and the lake had gentle 1 foot waves. While we didn't have a volleyball, we did bring a frisbee and we headed out in the the blue. The sun shone down and reflected off the water, and a very light breeze blew in from off the lake. It was a perfect day to frolic. Just beyond the marked swimming area, a flotilla of personal watercraft lurked and puttered about. Stephanie was quite impressed with all the sailboats. I think when she is a rich old lady she will buy herself one. We tossed around the frisbee and were generally joyous for several hours. We briefly left the water to grab a hot dog at the local vendor, but we didn't wait a half hour after eating like the urban myth says and quickly scampered across the burning sand back to the inviting wet stuff.

JD and Judith. She actually puts up with him.

Later in the day we walked out to the end of the pier and jumped off the end. The pier juts out quite a ways from the beach and has ladders built in the end of it just for the goofy kids like us who wanted to jump off the approx 8 feet down to the water. I had some trepidations about jumping off, but after I saw a quartet of 5 year olds jump off I figured I can act like a 5 year old once in a while. Stephanie was the last one to dive off, and she took quite a bit of coaxing to get her in, but she had fun.Jumping off the pier, above and below.

None of us were relishing the idea of the walk back, especially Judith due to some blisters she had developed on the walk there. JD came to the rescue and ran back to the car while we sat and ate ice cream at a little stand along the road. He's such a trooper, reminds me of Dad.

After getting back to the house we changed and got ready for dinner. Steph and I both fell asleep on the couch waiting for JD and Judith to get ready. We went to dinner at a restaurant called Morrow's in Saugatuck. Saugatuck is little touristy type town outside of Holland, right off the bay. It doesn't have a beach, but it does have water and lots of spendy boats parked there. We put our names in at the restaurant and then walked around to find postcards and look at the sights of the town. There are lots of cute little shops there, and I think all people older than 50 reading this blog would have a good time shopping around. We walked along the waterfront admiring the floating phallic replacements and then headed back to the restaurant for dinner.

Dinner was splendid Italian food. Unfortunately there was a rowdy group of drunks singing directly behind us. They sang "when the moon hits your eye" or whatever the crap that song is called, and I wanted to stab them in the face. Fortunately we know sign language, and didn't let it ruin our dinner. JD grabbed the check and wouldn't let it go even after I ripped it, so he wins this round.

Mmmmm, cheesecake.

We went back to Holland had one drink, and passed out from a long day of fun.