Home Sweet Home, Canadian Lakes, Michigan

Once we got home and some snow really hit, I realized that I blog

about all of our travels, but never blog about our home state because it doesn’t feel like travel seeing Michigan.  We did the Mackinaw Bridge walk this year and I got to feel like a bad mother, because while I prepared for rain, I didn’t bring  sunscreen and the Bean got burned.  That was an awesome 

  adventure, but I didn’t blog it because it was home.  Well, this week driving to and from work having just gotten home from the south, Michigan felt like a foreign land to me.  I was  driving home through slushy, icy, roads with snow heaped on the sides of the road and near whiteout conditions 

and realized that I was calmly driving home at 40mph as if this was normal.  I realized that a few years ago, this scenario would have freaked me out, 10   years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered it.  In ten

years of living in Michigan, I have gone from calling work to ask if we’re open, buying bread and milk when they talk about a snow storm, to not even watching the weather or barely paying attention to school closings because regardless, John and I are going to have to

 go to work.  Our work places never close despite winter storm warnings and 10 inches of snow.  The first day of our caregiver’s work, she drove into a snowbank and she’s a Michigander.  Michigan winter  is one thing, but the summer and fall turns this state into the best place to be in the world in

   my humble opinion.  It’s warm, but not as hot as Tampa at Christmas, the lakes are beckoning (not the great lakes, they’re still too cold for a southern girl), but the inland lakes are great and there are all these charming little towns around here with downtowns 

  that are perfect for shopping.  You can’t get better craft beer anywhere, you can drive to anyplace in the state (except the upper peninsula) in about 3 hours and everyone here is Midwestern friendly.  Now, after saying that, I feel that I must add the caveat that I don’t spend much time in Detroit, but there it’s your usual big city folk…and we still haven’t in 10 years been to the spot in Michigan voted the most beautiful place in the entire United States, Sleeping Bear dunes.  We have to remedy that soon.  So, enjoy some pictures from a state that everyone should visit even though your first thought might be, “Michigan----Detroit, snow, cars, and not much else” (at least that’s what I thought Michigan was before I moved here)…