After packing up our camp and finishing yesterday's blog, we left Orchard Beach CG at about 11 am, and drove south to the Van Buren State Park, again on the east side of Lake Michigan. We stopped in Muskegon for a break at the Coffee Factory, rated a 5.0 by Google maps. We drove a slow road (infected with stop lights) the rest of the way to the park, which is just south of South Haven. We set up our campsite. The park has over 200 sites and most are occupied with the usual monster trailers. However, there are a greater number of tents, a lot more trees, and our site feels more private than the one at Orchard Beach.
After the setup, we took a short bike ride through the campground and then found a spur to the Van Buren Trail which goes north to South Haven. The official trail also goes south to Hartford. It is paved and should be a great access to the Kal-Haven Trail that is a rails-to-trail route going over 30 miles to Kalamazoo, roughly east. More on that tomorrow, I hope.
We took a side road on the way "home" and had a couple of notable sightings -- a black squirrel, a woodchuck (or groundhog, a kind of marmot), and a friendly calico cat with no tail. Earlier while in South Haven getting dinner supplies and visiting the post office, we had another unusual sighting - an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle. You may wonder why this is noteworthy - well, we just listened to an audiobook written by Craig Johnson, whose main character is Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming (fictional county). In the story, the neighboring sheriff department was gifted one of these monster vehicles and Sheriff Walt got to drive it - he was the only person who knew how to start it and used it to subdue the bad guys in the story. The real MRAP we saw was owned by the South Haven Sheriff's Department.
How are the mosquitoes there? C
ReplyDeleteI like the looks of you new rig. You should be able to go almost anywhere with that thing!! Carolyn
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