Camping at Onaway SP last week - Julie  Reporting

Sunday: arrived at Onaway State Park. Adequate sized spot, but crowded close to other campers. On Site 23, we are across the road from sites on the lake. View of lake somewhat blocked by trailers. Can’t see sunrise or sunset from this side of the lake, so walked to the beach area to watch the sunset.

The lake is rocky with what looks like angular pieces of limestone. Not good swimming lake for that reason, here, but the swimming area is sandy and looks nice. If it wasn’t so cold, I would go swimming.

That night our large group of neighbors were having a great time, and I was tired and wanted to sleep, but I could hear every word of their loud conversations. They talked standing right next to my tent. I think it was about ten when they quieted down, so that wasn’t too bad. However, by 6:00 am they were up and talking as they were breaking camp. After they left it was reasonably quiet again. That morning, being Labor Day, most of the campers cleared out, and now the camp is peaceful, although the weather is a bit cool. Tim and I went to see the falls. They were nice. We continued over to ROGERS City on Lake Huron. Traveling up the coastline, we stopped at Hoeft State Park to give it a look see. I loved this park, mostly because of the golden sandy dunes and the jewel-tone blues of the lake and paths running throughout. I put it on my list of parks to visit in the future.

We also checked out Cheybogen SP. lots of room between camp sites. We didn’t have time to do much more than take a quick look and move on because I was hungry.

We drove up to Mackinaw City for lunch/dinner and explored the touristy strip on the main road. We ate at Pancake Chef. I had the patty melt. I had to remove the onions that weren’t grilled because I don’t like raw onions, but other than that, it was very good. Tim said his hamburger was tasty. After that we got ice cream in waffle cones and walked around. We bought a large decal for the back of our trailer: silver plate metal in the shape of Michigan. So far Michigan is the only state we’ve camped since we got the trailer.

On the way back to camp, we drove by Aloha State Park and pulled in to check it out. Nice, but basically a big grassy parking lot by the lake. The lake is stony. I didn’t get out and look at the beach. Not my kind of camp ground. (Update: several people have kindly informed me that the lake at Aloha is stoney next to the shore, but gets sandy as you go deeper. Also that the swimming beach is sandy. Thank you to them.) (I still prefer widely-spaced wilderness woodsey campsites to grassy close-together campsites. I'm a nature fanatic.)

Beautiful evening on Monday. Lots of lakeside sites available now.

Tuesday we woke to pouring rain. It’s a good thing our noisy neighbors left on Monday. Their tent sites were underwater. FYI: Don’t reserve site 24.

Tim and I took showers. I would give the showers a rating of 10 for cleanliness, a place to sit, powerful hot-but-not-too-hot showers, two hooks (3 is ideal), BUT the shower drains were slow and pretty soon one is standing in two inches of water with people’s hair wads floating around one’s feet. So they get a 9.

The sun came out and it warmed up. Tim had no interest in going to Mackinaw Island, so we stayed at camp. We got out our new toy: an inflatable kayak. Although it was supposed to be suitable for two people, it really wasn’t. So Tim and I took turns kayaking the lake.

Clouds moved in and the rain returned. We had hobo dinners for supper, but the potatoes didn’t get done so we had to finish them in a frying pan.

That night there was more rain, but mostly there was wind. All night the wind whistled through the trees. Condensation appeared on the inside of the tent part of our hybrid camper and the wind shook it off on us occasionally throughout the night just let us know who was boss.

More to come...