Visit to Sleeping Bear Dunes

On the way home from our camping trip, which you can read about here, we stopped off at the Sleeping Bear Dunes, which is located in northwest Lower Michigan along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The sign at the entrance to the park read "Dune Climb". Now we had no idea what we were in store for. After paying the $10 park entrance fee, this gets you into any of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore Parks by the way. We pulled into our parking space facing what looked like a big wall of sand. This was definitely the biggest sand hill we had ever seen. We grabbed a bottle of water for each us, which I highly recommend you don't forget!! We were on our way up the hill with all the other adventurous people that were there that day. After about 20 feet up the hill we realized that this was going to be a bit more than a relaxing little hike. We had to stop and rest every so often. After about 25 minutes or so we made it to the top, well at least we thought it was the top, it was actually far from the top. There was yet another large dune we had to climb. Kara wasn't the least bit happy about it either. I persuaded her to go for it because if you came this far you may as well go all the way. That worked this time, but not the next time. About half way up the second dune, I decided to go up to the top myself to see if it was worth her coming up. Once I got up there I was disappointed to see that we still had yet another dune to climb over. Now this all may not sound too difficult, but it's not all that easy to walk up a steep hill of sand while the hot sun is blazing down on you. It drains you very quickly, especially if you're not used to that kind of strain. I then told Kara to go back down halfway and wait for me. I didn't want to go all this way without seeing the other side. So after about another 15 mins of running up and down a few more hills I finally made it to a point where I could see Lake Michigan on the other side. After snapping a few pictures I was on my way back down the dunes to Kara. Although it was very strenuous exercise, it was well worth it. I mean how often to do we get to do something like this. If you get the chance, I recommend you try it. Even it you don't make it to the other side, it's well worth the experience.