21st Stop - Silver Lake Sand Dunes (MI)

Blog Post #28 - Written August 13, 2025

Stay: June 20-22, 2025


We stayed near the Silver Lake Sand Dunes at Dunes Harbor Family Camp, a Christian-based, family-friendly campground. It was a huge campground with lots of fun activities for the kids. We had such a fun time here. This would be a fun spot for a week-long family reunion or vacation with friends.

The first day we arrived, after we set up the trailer, we biked over to the archery range and the boys got to try out some little compound bows.


Video of Z shooting the bow & arrow
Video of Q shooting the bow & arrow

That first night, we also joined the campground worship song circle. The kids loved drumming along :)
We learned a bunch of new worship songs and also led the circle in signing one of our favorite songs, Amazing Grace. And since Megan just finished reading a book about the writer (John Newton), she shared the backstory of how he came to write such a powerful song. (And if you haven't seen the 2006 movie "Amazing Grace", go check it out from your local library and watch it!)


The pool area here was awesome. It has a little zero-entry splash pad for D, a lazy river shallow enough for Q and Z, and a deeper water basketball area and water slide. We might've swam all 3 days haha.

I was so proud of Q and Z for going down the water slide by themselves. Q loved it so much he just kept going and going and going!
Video of Q braving the water slide (he loved it and kept going again and again)

 
D loved jumping into my arms...or over my head haha.  Q had way too much fun running and jumping in.
Video of Gary launching Q into the lazy river 
Video of Gary jumping D up and down in the lazy river.
If i ever stopped, they'd both yell, "Again! Again! Again!"  :)

The campground also has a partnership with a nearby stable to provide inexpensive pony rides and free horse-drawn wagon rides. We enjoyed both :)



D was just too cute in her Sunday church dress, she had to have a little impromptu photo shoot.

 

The Dunes themselves are best enjoyed flying around in an ORV.  We decided to save that for another time when our kids are older and will enjoy it more.  Instead, we went to the pedestrian section to hike up and try sliding down on cardboard. Unfortunately, it was crazy windy our whole stay here, so we didn't have an "ideal weather day" to explore the dunes. We made the best of it, but I'm not going to lie, it was pretty rough. Especially for the kids, and especially for D and Q, who didn't appreciate the sand flying in their eyes and pelting and stinging their sensitive legs.
But we still had fun, found a baby turtle, got lost on top of the dunes (like a whole 'nother world up there), played in the sand, and found this huge old lighthouse. 


Video of our first (and only successful) attempt to slide down the dunes


 




All in all, this was one of our favorite campgrounds and we look forward to returning in a few years for a full week, and with some ORVs! 
It was an action packed few days, and D was feeling it by the end haha. She curled up and fell asleep at the table after lunch as we were packing up to leave haha.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are We Doing This?

Image
Blog Post #1 - Written: April 20, 2025 Why Are We Doing This? Hi there, my name is Gary. My wife, Megan, and I are embarking on a 12-15 month (we think) adventure around these United States with our 3 young children: Z - 6 yo, Q - 4 yo, D - almost 2 yo. The first question people usually ask when we tell them our plans is “Why? How did you come to this [crazy] decision?” To answer that, I need to take you back in time a bit. Megan grew up in CA and I grew up in CA. We met and married in UT and then moved out here to OH for work after graduating college. We’ve lived here for 8 years, which was longer than we expected. But for good reasons! We’ve truly enjoyed our time here; my work/company/coworkers are awesome, the weather is nice (besides the gray winter), the people are good, and it’s so GREEN! Coming from the desert out west, we were blown away by the never ending forest and little rivers and streams everywhere! But all that said, for reasons I can’t fully explain (although likely du...
Read more

Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us

Image
Blog Post #7 - Written May 3, 2025 I don't have a great selection of photos for this 'misc' post, but here's one from the de-winterization process. Not pictured is the hour I wasted trying to figure out why the outdoor kitchen sink (above) wasn't draining...only to finally realize the strainer was also a plug and even after you take it out, it drains slowly... Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us The thing about uprooting your entire lives to become nomads and live the relaxing nomadic life is, it takes a lot of planning and work!  Our lives for the 4 months of January to April were so incredibly busy and exhausting, I felt like this trip wasn’t worth it many times.  Even before January, Megan was spending a couple hours every night researching where we wanted to go and planning routes and finding costs and details of like 700 places of interest. Mind, we’re only doing this for 12-15 months haha, so she then also spent hours paring down her list (with some input...
Read more

Choosing Our Ride - Trucks

Image
Blog Post #3 - Written April 20, 2025 Choosing Our Ride - Trucks Megan and I have never owned a truck before and our only experience driving one was driving a 26’ U-Haul truck towing our old Toyota Corolla from UT to OH in 2017. And the only time I tried backing that up I immediately jack-knifed and had to unhitch the car haha.  So when we told the RV dealer that we would buy a truck later, he understandably laughed and shook his head. But we figured, as we always do, that we’d figure it out along the way, like we always do. I talked to my boss (a big truck guy with lots of experience towing heavy boats and stuff) and a couple others and basically learned that we’d need a F-250 or bigger. They recommended we look for 3 things: Towing capacity: Our trailer has a dry weight of about 9,000 lbs, so once fully packed we estimated it would be about 11,000 lbs. So we needed something with a minimum of 12,500 lbs towing capacity to have a little breathing room. And the more breathing room ...
Read more