Part Four: The Dunes

 

 

 

Our third day in Michigan we drove up to Silver Lake and to the dunes…none of us girls had ever been to any dunes, so this was a really fun experience!  But first, we ate some taco salad at the picnic tables that were at the state park 😉

 

When we started climbing the dunes at the edge of the woods, we couldn’t believe how much sand was there!  And we hadn’t even reached the top of that dune yet!

 

 

Before we got too far, we ran into some friends from church who were camping at Silver Lake 😀  It was fun to get to walk the dunes with them, too!

This is Hannah, Suzanna (our friends) Bekah, Noah and Anna running down a large dune.

 

Digging holes…Isaiah especially loved doing this!  He’d run for a while, then stop all of the sudden and start digging a hole.  This was one giant sandbox to him 😉

 

More dunes!  You walk to the top of one….and there’s another!

 

Silver Lake…they say it’s shrinking 5 feet every year because of the sand blowing into it!  There are cottages along the edge of the dunes, and one guy spends $10,000 every year, just keeping the sand from burying his house!  It’s against the law to remove the sand from the state park, so he has it dumped on the opposite side of the park from his house.  We heard that there are at least a couple of houses that the owners finally gave up on…and they’re buried underneath the dunes somewhere!  The sand is constantly blowing and moving.

 

Running down another dune…running down was the really fun part, especially on the steep dunes!

 

A very large sand dune…probably the second largest one we climbed.

 

 

This one was probably the largest one (that we climbed).  There was so much wind on the dunes that we all wore jackets-partly because it was cold, partly to protect ourselves from the sand!  When we stood at the top edge of the dune, we’d literally get sand blasted 😀

 

Silver Lake…and the base of the largest sand dune.

 

We like this picture 😀

Lake Michigan.  We didn’t walk all the way to it.  It looked like it was just over one dune, but our friends said that it was really three dunes before you even got to the wooded area!

 

The largest sand dune…

A panorama picture we took…

 

More of the dunes, and Lake Michigan.

 

 

By the end of the afternoon, we were a wind-blown, sand-blasted bunch!  We had sand in our teeth, ears, hair…everywhere!  After the dunes we visited the lighthouse, then some friends of ours who lived near Silver Lake invited us over for supper.  They said they were used to sand, so they didn’t mind that we had it everywhere.  Later that evening Isaiah was playing around and laid on the floor and put his feet in the air…and the sand in his pockets poured out into a nice little pile on their carpet 😳  😀

 

 

We had so much fun that day, and definitely slept well that night!  Some of us are still sore from walking through all that sand 😀

 

 

 

Either later today, or tomorrow, we’ll have a post for you about visiting downtown Holland 😉

 

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