This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)
cruising adventures on the Great Loop!
DAY 136 - August 14, 2017
We slept in! We had our cranberry - pecan muffins from the Baker's Wife with our coffee for breakfast, and they were delicious. We did absolutely nothing else before lunch. Patty read her Kindle, and I wrote my blog for the day before, played on my computer, and looked at the wonderful railway exhibits right above our slip. Sometimes pure relaxation is what is called for!
The railway artifacts are right where the Grand Trunk Western railway used to be. The coal tipple is a massive structure that was used to feed coal to the locomotives of the Grand Trunk Western Railway. The rest of the artifacts here are from the Pere Marquette railway, including the Pere Marquette locomotive 1223 and coal car, a Pere Marquette box car, a Pere Marquette caboose, and a Grand Trunk Western caboose. It appears that the Grand Trunk Western ran through Grand Haven, while the Pere Marquette railway did not, but Grand Haven ended up with the artifacts!
 |
Grand Trunk Western Tipple Tower |
 |
| Pere Marquette Locomotive 1223 and coal car |
 |
| Pere Marquette Boxcar |
 |
| Pere Marquette caboose |
 |
| Grand Trunk Western caboose |
After lunch, we rode our bikes along the catwalk out to the South Light. Along the shore there is a wonderful beach, and a lot of families were enjoying the water, sun and sand. Right behind the beach, there is a 174 space RV park that can be reserved with the Michigan Campground and Harbor online site. It is not out of the question that we might return here in our Alaska Camper and our Silverado 3500 one day!
 |
| South Pier Light |
 |
| Beach at South Pier |
 |
| RV Park at South Pier |
Later on, we decided to go to dinner at JW's Restaurant, which some people had recommended to us for the fried perch dinner. We rode our bikes out there only to find that it would be a 45 minute wait to get seated in what the online reviews said was a "totally average" restaurant! So we headed back down to the waterfront and had dinner on the deck at Snug Harbor Restaurant overlooking the channel. Now, you do not expect to find excellent sushi at a waterfront restaurant in Grand Haven - and we did not! It was, as Patty said, "not bad"! Certainly not up to the standard of Grand Sushi in Mackinac Island! But the view was fantastic, and we enjoyed the sushi all the same!
 |
| View from Snug Harbor Restaurant deck |
We decided to pass on seeing the musical fountain light show for a third time, and we went home and went to bed!
Tomorrow we are off to Lake Kalamazoo (Saugatuck). The weather forecast is good. After Lake Kalamazoo, we will go to the free wall at St. Joseph, and the weather forecast for that is good as well. We have reservations for New Buffalo Marina for Saturday, which is our jumping off point for Chicago, and we have allowed a couple of days for bad weather, which it looks like we are going to encounter, in fact, the St. Joseph to New Buffalo run might just be lumpy, as the weather forecasts through Saturday are not good at all! We shall have to see how that goes!
St. Joe: The city wall is close to downtown St. Joe. However, I don't think it is the best place to spend the night. The wall is not really set up for smaller boats like a C-Dory. Depending on the lake level you'll probably have to use the rungs welded to the wall to get in and out of your boat. I would get a berth in the West City Marina (I haven't done this) or anchor in the river above Marina Island (I have done this though). Commercial traffic does not come up that far.
ReplyDeleteWe are tied up at the city wall right now, and hooked up to the free 30 amp power! The top of the sidewalk is only about a foot above the top of the gunwale. The trick is fendering, which we learned at Mackinac Island - fender the post, not the boat! Pix tomorrow!
ReplyDelete