Upper Peninsula road trip, Kitch-Iti-Kipi, and orchard yurt.

While the kids are at camp, our plan is to spend a few weeks being very boring, enjoying nature, reading quietly, doing arts and crafts, and hiking around Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. It felt very weird to drop the kids at camp and then drive away with an empty car…

Our first stop was a clear natural spring, it’s (kind of) along the way to our campsite for the night. There’s copper in the water so it’s beautifully blue-green. They have a raft to carry visitors out into the middle of the spring, where you can look down through the middle of the raft to see the water bubbling up through the sand below.

Then we drove north to Grand Marais, on the shore of Lake Superior, where we had a yurt to stay for the night. It’s in an (old?) apple orchard, with lots of wildflowers growing all around. Grand Marais is a little town with a kind of end-of-the-road, old summer-beach-vacation kind of feeling. There’s a big campground with lots of campers, a couple of variety stores, coffee shop, brewery, ice cream shop, and a rock shop. Not too many fresh veggies in the grocery selection, but there are lots of cool rocks to find on the sandy beaches of Lake Superior.