Winds Howling

Camilla and I just got back from a weekend road trip from our home in metro Detroit to Indiana Dunes National Park and back. Along the way, we…

…stopped for dinner and drinks at One Well Brewing in Kalamazoo.

…camped at Indiana Dunes National Park, site 4 of the Mather loop. There was a lot of train action around this area; tracks everywhere, stopped the car once to wait for one to pass, and all night we heard their choo-chooing.

…woke up and hiked the Greenbelt trail, up and down the dunes to the shore of Lake Michigan, where we glimpsed a hazy Chicago skyline.

…saw the lighthouse in Michigan City, Indiana, the 65th lighthouse we’ve seen together. We couldn’t walk all the way out to it due to some kind of amphibious construction work going on.

…got drinks at Transient Artisan Ales in Bridgman, Michigan. We’ve been wanting to come here for a couple years now, trying and failing to make plans with multiple different groups of people before we finally decided to just go by ourselves. It was pretty quiet and unremarkable on the inside, very much like a hundred other breweries we’ve visited. Their beers, on the other hand, are pretty unique. Their Bark Lord stout and Smolverine line are basically what got us into beer and breweries a couple of years ago.

…poked around the campus of the University of Notre Dame outside of South Bend, Indiana. Lovely Catholic vibes. Lots of sprightly Christian-summer-camp-looking youths walking around. Only one group of these started harrassing us. The rest were nice.

…got pizza and beers at Danny Boy Draft Works. While we were here, I got a huge headache. I ended up KO’d in the passenger seat while Camilla drove to our next campground.

…camped at Pokagon State Park Campground, site 278 of nonelectric campground 2. This was a nice, quiet campground, though the layout is nefariously mazelike.

…gloried in the full moon.

…got breakfast at The Bull Pen Cafe in Fremont, Indiana.

…toured the bison herd at Wild Winds Buffalo Preserve in Fremont, Indiana. We saw birds flitting from one bisons’s face to the next, picking at bugs and seeds. Our tour guide was James William Elias, a soulful 86-year-old “old hippie” with Cherokee blood and the alias of “Three Paws.” He had lots of stories about the bison talking to him and generally being mystical.

…drove to the point where the states of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio meet.

…checked out the town of Manchester and got beers at Manchester Brewing. I’ll be writing more about this town.