Potawatami State Park

 

The week found us at Bay Beach for our now obligatory summer trip on the Zippin Pippin, plenty of smiles and only the single back snapping abrupt stop at the end.  We also so found our second waterless waterfall of the season...making it really just a cliff.  Most importantly however we made it out camping!!  With a bit of luck, Amy found Potawatomi State Park had some openings so we dragged out the camper and flushed out the pink slurry of winterizer and headed north.  It is a great little campground with nice hiking trails and I think we did about a 6 mile loop from our site to a wonderfull pebble beach.  Ella caught one of the few Garder snakes we found basking in the sun. We skipped rocks until our parental fear figured enough time had passed without four kids careening a perfect skipper off another's noggin and then continued on the trail.  Kids were pretty wore out by the time we got back and a wrong turn didn't help the situation but there were plenty of smiles around the campfire.  We did try our hand at making fire from just a stick and board.  It was a sort of goal for the summer and although the summer is still not gone the task is a least making us appreciate the beauty of matches.  Campfires require smores, but Amy stepped it up a notch by creating Smoreos.  A new spin on an old campfire favorite now has oreo cookies in place of antiquated Grahm crackers.  We headed a little deeper into the Door to visit Ron and Jan at another campground and stopped at the iconic PC Junction.  The little train leaves the kitchen carrying our orders to the delight of the kids.  We also poked around a swam awhile at WhiteFish Dunes state park as Potawatami doesn't have a beach to swim at. The water was cold but the kids crashed in the waves and hardly noticed the dangerous rip tide sign.  On the way out we were sidetracked on a beautiful out of the way Cave Point.  This is a series of limestone cliffs overlooking the lake and some teenagers were jumping into what seemed to be dangerously high and turbulent water.  As we hiked the waters edge, scrambling over much lower shelves of dolomite we found an amazing area of beach where hundreds of cairns had been built on the beach.  It was breathtakingly beautiful with some of the spires taller than the kids.  We maneuvered through them and even added a few of our own to the impressionist version of the terra cota army.