Happy New Year! I hope your celebration involved lots of fun whether or not it involved champagne. For you playing at home, mine did. And wine at Bluestone and Rove. And cocktails at Mammoth. It was a fun evening.
I like to hit the trails on New Year’s Day. We had company – and the day was a gray, drizzly mess – so I didn’t go for too long of a walk, but did have a shorter on at the Lake Ann Pathway. But as my office was closed to observe the holiday on the 2nd – well, a day late is better than nothing. And the day was gray and drizzly, just gray.
My day started quite well. It only took 15 minutes to get from my West Bay home to Acme which is almost unheard of – apparently, I wasn’t the only one with the day off. I continued my way up through Elk Rapids to Maplehurst. This trail has a special place in my heart, becoming a favorite when we spent our first five months in the Traverse City area on the East Bay and on Eighth Street. It’s a bit of a drive now from my Leelanau Peninsula house, but if I have the time, I do like to make the trip. The land was a summer camp for over 50 years before closing in 2011 and later being purchased and used as a park.
The trails were nearly empty which makes me happy – I was walking an hour before I finally saw anyone else. The big snows of a week ago (those two feet just before Christmas) were nearly gone, though the parts of the trail were a slippery mess because of all the mud. But the views of Torch Lake were still nice.
My hour-and-a-half walk concluded, I stopped by the roadside cairn on Cairn Highway, a most-appropriately named road. The cairn is made from stones from each of Michigan’s 82 counties and sits on the 45th parallel.
And I took pictures of the two counties I have lived, just for fun – my current one, Leelanau, and the one I lived in while in Haslett, Clinton County.
Leelanau County means “Land of Delight”. Well, it actually doesn’t. Henry Schoolcraft, who was responsible for many of the county names in Michigan, like the sound of the word and named a county after it.
Clinton County is named after DeWitt Clinton, the seventh governor of New York, and a presidential candidate. And we have a county in Michigan named after him. Go figure.
You know what places don’t have a lot of people during the winter? Beaches. They are nice places to walk, and just north of Elk Rapids is Old Bathing Beach. No, seriously – it is on Google Maps. As it was on US-31 on my way home, I stopped for a walk on the partially frozen beach for a nice view of Old Mission across the bay.
And there were these neat little ice balls floating between the beach and the frozen swells of the bay.
It was a good start to the year, and I hope I get the opportunity to go on many more.
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