Part One: A Lake Cottage

 

 

To put you all at rest,  Julianne was right…it was Holland, Michigan,  not the Netherlands 😀  Wasn’t very nice of us, was it, to get you all going that way?!  😀  However, we enjoyed America’s Holland so much, some of us wouldn’t mind visiting the ‘real’ Holland someday 😀

 

We discovered that we have so many pictures, we are going to have to break this up into several parts.  We’ve pared the pictures down to 175 of them, and though that’s pretty good out of 2,000+, it is still way too many for a single post 😀  (Great minds think alike, don’t they Tulip?!)

 

So we’ll start at the very beginning (’cause it’s usually a pretty good place to start 😉  )

 

We were originally wanting to go camping around the Indiana Dunes, but then someone told us about Silver Lake Dunes, and it turned out that our pastor’s family also went there and really enjoyed it.  So we planned to camp this past week at the Silver Lake state park.  The only problem was that we supposedly had too many people to fit on one campsite.  Even though we were all in one camper with no extra tents, they still wanted us to get two campsites.   We joked that we’d put our camper on one, and eat on the other, but we were feeling kind of upset that we had to pay for two campsites when we’d only use one 😛  However, we figured it would be worth it and went ahead and reserved two campsites (who cares where the extra campsite was…we could reserve the one by the dumpster that nobody had picked yet 😛  😀 ).

Then Susannah, Charissa, Cassia and Mommy went visited some friends, just a few days before we were supposed to leave.   The girls told them about our upcoming camping trip, but before Mommy and the girls left, our friends offered their lake cottage on Lake Michigan/Lake Macatawa to us to stay in instead!  It was about an hour away from Silver Lake, so we’d still be able to go see the dunes if we wanted to.  Well!  We were excited about that!  A few of us weren’t sure if we wanted to give up camping, but agreed that it would be fun to stay in the ‘beach house’ as we called it 😀

Before we go any farther, we have to show you this beach house.   We had recently gotten ‘beach house fever’ and were looking up all these lovely houses on the Outer Banks.  We finally decided on Shell Cottage, the one in the link, as our dream beach vacation house. It was kind of a crazy dream, seeing how expensive it can be to rent one for a week, but it was a fun dream nonetheless.  We loved the way it was decorated and everything…it was so pretty!

 

Then our friends offer for us to use their lake cottage, and it’s just as pretty, if not prettier than Shell Cottage!  God is so good!  And our friends are so generous!   They inherited it from family, and now they use it to bless other people 😀

 

So part one of our vacation posts, is on the ‘beach house’, or lake ‘cottage’.

 

You’re probably thinking what we were thinking, “That’s a cottage??” 😀

When we finally arrived on Monday, we ran right into the house and explored every room there was to explore, exclaiming and giggling the whole way 😀  We kept saying, ‘It’s SO pretty!  It’s SO pretty!’.  Lake Macatawa was visible from the windows of the house, and Lake Michigan was just a short walk away.

 

 

Here’s the ‘walk’ between the houses…in horse and buggy days, this was the street.  Now it’s just a walk to go down to the beach on Lake Michigan.

 

 

 

 

The lovely fireplace

 

We couldn’t agree more…

 

 

{The Kitchen}

 

One of the balconies

 

 

The Dining Room

 

One of the bedrooms…this one had porch access.

 

 

Daddy and Mommy got this one…it was the only bedroom on the lower floor.  Not to mention, it had porch access, remember??  😀

 

 

The porch, right outside of the above bedroom…

 

The other part of the porch, on the front side of the house…

{The sunroom}

 

 

A desk in another bedroom…don’t you love the ships and boats?!

 

 

Looking out at the balcony, from another bedroom.  You can see Lake Macatawa in the background there.

 

 

 

 

We girls used this bathroom upstairs…and it was *so* pretty!!!  Funny how a bathroom can be so beautiful, but it was 😉

 

::Outside on the balcony::

 

 

The Purple Room…this room was the one everybody wanted!  It had access to two balconies, the bay window in the turret, a view of Lake Macatawa, not to mention it was decorated the prettiest!  Thankfully we came to an agreement without having to flip quarters, arm wrestle, or anything else, lol!  The agreement was that everybody else could come and use the balcony whenever they liked, which worked out beautifully 😀   Anna, Bekah and Charissa got the Purple Room, in case you were wondering 😉

 

Isn’t it just beautiful??

 

Outside on one of the balconies…this one comes off of the purple room and you can walk into the next door which goes to the room beside the purple room 😀  So the two rooms share this balcony.  Jessica and Leah got the room beside the purple room.

 

 

Charissa, enjoying the balcony 😉

 

 

 

 

Some ‘Delft Blue pottery’…so pretty!

 

 

 

The boys greatly enjoyed the outdoor furniture…they took nearly all the pillows and piled them up on their own chairs 😀

 

What we had for our Labor Day supper 😉   Brats from a local farmer on coconut flour ‘buns’ with our own watermelon from our garden…oh yummy!

 

Daddy and the boys outside grilling the brats.

 

 

Looking down the ‘walk’ towards Lake Michigan during sunset

 

 

The sunroom at night…it had rope lighting behind the trim over the windows.

 

{the lake cottage at night}

 

Just in case all the pictures weren’t enough…we took a couple of videos 😀  Here’s one of them where Jessica just took the camera through the house to see what everybody was doing…hopefully in a coming post we’ll be able to post another video we took of a tour of the house, especially for you 😉  Right now it is uploading…and it’s taking a looong time!

 

We were ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ at Susannah’s expression while scrubbing the toilet when we uploaded this 😀

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JgTe2MbHm4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

 

 

A few of the family pictures we took on the front steps…

 

 

 

 

Come back tomorrow for our post about when we went and visited Windmill Island 😉

 

By the way, we *loved* reading all your fun comments on our last post 😀  Even if we were naughty to tease you like that 😉

 

 

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