On Sunday my boys and I went for a drive.

We went to one of my favorite places, the Pier in Frankfort.

I love these grates.

If they give you a guilt trip by showing you the little fish, maybe you won’t hurt it.

There are so many cool textures right now.

Heading out.

It’s always a little tense walking down the last section of the pier…

It just doesn’t feel wide enough, especially when you take your five year old!

Almost there…

I love it when nature “draws the line in the sand.”

See… these are the duck tracks and this is the tracks of the dog that ate the duck…

Aren’t big brother’s great.

This picture of Charlie reminds me of the Beatles Abby Road cover…

SEE

Obviously, a totally different setting, but the repetition of the lines and the walking…

What do you think?

After the Pier of course we had to stop at the boy’s favorite restaurant…

Charlie had to have his favorite…

A foot long!

On the way home Charlie said “This was a good day.” Cooper said “Yeah, a very good day.”

I thought so too.

I hope your weekend was as pleasant as mine.

I took a lot of pictures without the fish eye, but they all feel so flat, I am sure the novelty will wear off sometime.

 I’m not sick of it yet.

 Are you guys?

The last two lighthouses are ones I’ve posted pictures of before.

The Old Mission Lighthouse

This is one you can be lighthouse keeper of.

Mackinaw Lighthouse

I took this shot when I visited the island with Beth this summer… Great time.

And to finish off the weekend posts I leave you with this picture of Charlie…

Calling the Waves

Oh to have the joy and imagination of childhood again.

One of my favorite things about being a parent is experiencing my childhood  over again through them.

Why have kids if you aren’t going to enjoy them, right?

What’s a great memory from YOUR childhood?

I decided I’d better take a moment, stop running all over the countryside, and do a post!

Today is the last day of…

Cherry Festival!

There is a parade this afternoon and fireworks tonight, but I don’t know if I have the energy left to go.

My Little Sister has been dragging me all over and it’s been WONDERFUL!

I have at least three or four blogs worth of pictures.

What have you all been up to?

Does your town have a festival?

To get to Onaway, we have to drive along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

I saw a lake.

It is such a hardship getting glimpses of all that rough water and blue sky.

Of course we had to stop and do some Petosky stone picking.

Ben is a master at finding them, but he wasn’t with us, so we didn’t find any.

We skipped stones instead.

I saw a lonely skipper.

.

One of the towns we stopped in was Charlivoix, a tiny harbor town.

I saw a lighthouse.

I saw a touch of FALL.

I saw water tracks in the sand.

I saw this sign.

HEMINGWAY NEVER ATE HERE

This part of Michigan was a Hemingway hang out, so it is funny to see someone NOT claiming him.

I saw my children struggling against the wind and loving every moment.

I saw them taking it all in and loved that they love it.

We also stopped to have yummy food and visited play grounds.

We went to Chillerama, a book store for Charlie’s favorite author and we stopped at three toy stores and specialty shops. It was a full day and I can’t wait to do it again in the summer!

NOW you know the drill…

TELL ME WHAT YOU SAW!

I start my new job at 5 tomorrow morning, my normal shift will start at 4.

I am supposed to be sleeping now. (shhh)

If you guessed bakery…

You were right! It’s a bread bakery.

I will never have to buy bread again!

Why do I feel like I should put “As God is my witness” in front of that?

Something else kind of fun happened today.

Just because I like being a big tease…

I’ll tell you about it later.

What’s the earliest you can get to sleep?

My Mom needed George out of the house today.

So Cooper and I took him to the beach!

I saw old dog happiness, gull chasing, and wave licking.

We went on a drive to Empire, Michigan. 

Cooper kept asking when we were going to be in  ”vampire”.

I saw Cooper so excited, he had one shoe off before he got to the sand.

I saw beautiful lake shore, blue water and blue, blue sky. 

I have decided to go back in a few weeks so I can get shots of the fall colors.

I saw viewfinders!  

I don’t know why, I LOVE viewfinders!

To me they seem like functional pieces of art.

I have some neat viewfinder shots from The Empire State Building too…

Maybe its because they remind me of cameras? Hmm…

I even saw some DOORS today!

I saw empty buildings.

If I lived closer I would be brainstorming ways to get cool reflection shots from this building…

I just didn’t have time today, well that, and my entourage was smaller,

 I didn’t have big kids to force into posing for me.

. 
I saw a cool old truck parked at Wild Flowers in Glen Arbor.

I love looking at this shop/garden nursery, 

but it is not a place a big dog and little monster would do well in, so we passed it by.

Today I saw many things.

Many wonderful things.

What did you see today?

Don’t forget there are DOOR links posted below.

I was wondering how many of you are still searching for you perfect door picture?

Yesterday we spent the day at the Sleeping Bear National Park. This has always been one of my favorite places to go.

 I remember trudging slowly up the dune as a child, all the way to the top, taking a minute to enjoy the view and the people that looked like ants way down below, then the pleasure of summersaulting head over feet towards the bottom when eating sand got old, standing and running so fast the top of my body couldn’t keep up with the bottom as I plummeted towards the bottom of the dune…

Well yesterday we didn’t get the joy of doing that… we just observed the dune from the car and then moved on.

This is the big dune, the tiny little dots on the sand are people, making their way to the top.

Our adventure yesterday wasn’t at the dune itself, it was in the woods around the dunes. We were on a mission, our mission was to find the highly sought after morel mushrooms… mmmm yummy…

I haven’t been mushrooming since I was much younger. We used to take the grandmas out every Mothers Day  Some where along the way, the walking became to difficult for some and we stopped going.  So we took a refresher course with a group of others and a park ranger.

There was a very large group of us so we knew if  we found some it wouldn’t be many, but the joy of looking at everything made it worth being there. Charlie found a gartner snake and a red back salamander, so he considered the trip a huge success.

I enjoyed the looking. There were so many fun things to see. Wild flowers are just coming out. We found quit a few. The woods are FULL of Trillium right now, they blanket the road side.

This is what a normal Trillium looks like, White with yellow anthers. NEVER pick one, if you do you kill the whole plant.Because we were walking in the woods we found these different genetic strains of Trillium.

We also saw Jack in the Pulpit, Dutchmen Pants, and Dog’s Tooth Lily… You may know these by different names. In the last picture of the green Trillium are the spotted leaves of the Trout Lily, they haven’t bloomed yet. Can you guys guess which flower is which?

Ooo also one of my favorite woodland plants is the Fiddle Fern.  Some people like to eat them in salads if you get the young enough… I haven’t tried it yet…

I think they are just so beautiful.

Remember the picture of that big tree reaching into the soil in my last post. That is a Beech Tree, there were tons of them in the woods… this is what they look like starting out…

It’s hard to believe that these tiny little things that are still wearing their Beech Nut caps will become this…

Here’s a picture of our group headed home… Yeah, there where a lot of us, surprisingly mostly older couples.

Charlie, Isabelle and Cooper where the only children there.

Well I guess that’s all for now.

I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures… But wait, I never told you if we succeeded in our hunt for fungus did I…

I guess you’ll just have to tune in tomorrow.

Lake Michigan, Grand Haven, Mi…

Will they or won’t they? Our hunt for fungus story continues tomorrow.