19th Stop - Timber Trails (Decatur, MI)

Blog Post #26 - Written July 25, 2025

Stay: June 13-16, 2025


This was our first of many stops in Michigan. I had always seen beautiful pictures of Michigan while we lived in Ohio, but had only been to the Detroit area. So I told Megan when she was planning out our route, that I wanted to explore Michigan. And plan she did! I don't even know how many places we visited, but after we eventually left Michigan, we looked back and realized we had spent almost an entire month in just that one state! It was pretty great, so I'm not complaining, but we're not going to get all the way around the country at that pace.

One thing we loved about Michigan, was how many what I'll call "family adventure" campgrounds their were. This was our first...and we loved it. Felt like the perfect place to have a future family reunion.

We didn't go on any special outings or excursions, except church on Sunday. Otherwise we just played around the campground and had a grand 'ole time! The playground was right in front of our site, which we loved and the kids did too. They made fast friends there and we decided to try and always book our future campsites as close to the playground as possible. 

I'll just list the fun we had here and share some pics and videos.

  • Shuffleboard
  • Horseshoes
  • Tether Ball
  • Playground
  • Private beach on the lake with inflatables, slide, and dock w/ diving board
  • Launching water balloons and then a water fight
  • Flying our drone around in the big open field. I got a lot better with the practice and Z actually did really well too!
  • I grabbed a book from their little library, "From Cradle to Grave: The Human Face of Poverty in America".  It's a few years old, but very insightful. Would recommend. (I do love how many campgrounds have little libraries so campers can share/swap/rotate books.)
  • First time grilling pork steaks. Delicious. And the inferno in the hollow stump was fun, of course!


 
               Shuffleboard was a lot of fun.                                D liked horseshoes, especially the sand pit.

View of the playground from our trailer. So nice and close.

Beach and swimming area.

Megan found this baby Spiny Softshell Turtle crawling across the sand into the lake water. Of course we had to catch him. Seeing wildlife like this is always the highlight of our adventures  :)

Video: Z jumping off the diving board. I was surprised and impressed by his adventurous spirit!
Video: Q eventually jumped off too, with Daddy.

I found this hollow stump in the campground's extra woodpile, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to roll it over to our site (100 yards away) and create a flaming inferno with it. With a couple logs underneath to create airflow, the flame of that sucker was several feet higher and hotter than a stolen tamale!

Bonus pic: D loves her brother Q. And they both love their momma.

Bonus tidbit we learned: This campground was our first exposure to full-time seasonal RVers. The campground is only open during the summer (like May-Oct). But there's a bunch of people that park their RVs there full time (I think it was only like $3,000-$3,500 per year) and then either live there full time during the summer and go south for the winter, or use it on the weekends if they live nearby. Seemed like a pretty sweet set up!

Bonus story: On the drive in to this stay, we crossed over some train tracks and the crossings were raised up on a little hill. Pretty steep little hills.  Steep enough that our hitch bottomed out and scraped the asphalt pretty good a couple times. Well when we arrived and started unhooking the trailer, I realized that our breakaway cable (a steel cable connecting the truck to a little breaker/switch on the trailer that would engage the trailer's brakes if the trailer somehow became unhitched while driving) had been underneath the hitch when it scraped the asphalt and was literally hanging on by just one strand. It broke apart when I touched it. So I got to make a visit to Ace Hardware to by some steel cable and clamps and hammer out a new one. Thanks to Megan and our neighbor, we actually did it!










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