Road trip

One of the things Mom and I enjoy doing together is our daily jaunt to the post office and stopping for coffee afterward.

King and I get our mail at a rural post office about 10 miles from where we live. Not always convenient, but it has certainly cut down on our junk mail.

So, most mornings Mom and I hop in the car and take a drive through the country. Our meanderings almost always take us along Lakeshore Drive to look at the lake and check out the progression of the seasons. I mentioned in my last post Pier Cove is one of our favorite spots. Our daily jaunts almost always include a drive past the Lake Michigan vista at Pier Cove.

Pier Cove, looking north.

The spot used to be a shipping port. According to a historic marker at the site: Surveyed in 1839, the village of Pier Cove was once hailed as "the busiest port between St. Joseph and Muskegon." Before the Civil War, Pier Cove was a bustling community and a major point for lumber distribution  with ships departing daily carrying tanbark and cordwood to Chicago and Milwaukee. With the exhaustion of the lumber supply in the late 1880s, the fire of 1871 and the coming of the railroad, the sawmill was moved to Fennville and Pier Cove's prosperity diminished. In the late 1880s, however fruit became a major shipping commodity. This site once overlooked the warehouse and two piers that revived the village's economy. In 1899 a freeze killed much of the local harvest and shipping at Pier cove was reduced to passenger traffic. Commercial activity ceased in 1917.

The spot is now a public beach. It's not a very long swatch sand, but it is one of the prettiest spots on the lake and is easily accessible for old arthritic knees. (That would be mine, Mom seems to manage the stairs with no problem).

This is the type of rock/stone found
along the beaches in southwest
Michigan.

Mom loves to look for rocks in the creek that runs into the lake at the site. In this part of southwest Michigan, the rocks have an unusual formation and have white cracks on them. These are not fossils. It's just the way the hard water leaves "stains" on the rocks. I guess that is the best way to describe them. Someone once told me the correct name for them, but I've stored it away along with how to avoid split infinitives.

Collecting unusual stones along the beach is something Mom and Dad did together when they lived in Glenn. The ones they particularly liked they polished. Somehow I have acquired these rocks. I have them in baskets on end tables in my house. It's as artsy-fartsy as I will ever become.

Mom and Dad loved to walk along the beach. Dad would tell us the story of coming along some nude sunbathers/swimmers one summer evening.
.
"I wasn't quite sure what to say," Dad related to us. "So I looked at the woman and said, 'I see the water is cold.'" That was my father. Ever the observant man.

This is one of the polished stones Mom and Dad
found years ago. They thought the marking on it
looked like a "D" for Don.

This is another stone they found.
They thought it looked like a lighthouse.
I think it looks like something else.

These are the rocks in the stream that runs into Lake Michigan
at Pier Cove.