Mackinaw City

Today we started a long weekend road trip to northern Michigan to go to the Detroit Red Wings training camp.  Out first stop is at Mackinaw City, at the northern tip of the lower peninsula.  A picture of the famous bridge to the upper peninsula is on the left.  It's about a 5 hour drive from home, so we stopped for lunch in Grayling at one of Mary's dad's favorite burger places, Spike's Keg O Nails.  He used to take me here when we came to Grayling to fish the Au Sable river.  It's a typical northern Michigan bar with great food and lots of beer.  He apparently never told his family about this place since Mary first heard about it from me. 8-)

After we got to out hotel, we took a drive to Wilderness State park to enjoy some beach time.  Well, we quickly discovered that most of the beach is gone due to the very high water in Lake Michigan! When we've been here in the past, there were several places where you could park and get to the beach, but most of those were closed this time due to the high water levels.  We were amazed to see this sign (click to enlarge), several feet into the water when it, obviously, was supposed to be high and dry. 

We did manage to get one long distance view of the bridge.  We'll get better pictures tomorrow when we take a ferry to Mackinaw Island before heading to Traverse City in the afternoon for the Wings' training camp activities.