St. Joe's, Michigan

Back in December, Ian and I decided that we needed a vacation.  A real, family vacation.  We certainly would have been happy with a little couple's getaway, but this was something that we wanted to try.  Last summer we went for a little under a week to Omaha for my brother and sister-in-law's wedding, and things went smoothly - although we had lots of family around, of course, to help keep all the kiddos entertained.

We wanted something that was under a day's drive away, so we decided on the Great Lakes area, and chose a lake town in south western Michigan: St. Joseph's.  It's connected to the slightly larger town of Benton Harbor, which will be the one to probably appear on most maps that don't go into detail.  Some of our neighbors had highly recommended this spot as a little family vacation area, and Ian's sister (and family) lived there for awhile, too.

Given that we have traveled so little with kids, and Willa still being so young, we made it a short trip - we left on Sunday and got home on Thursday.  Our first day there, we woke to this view out our window:

Day Two looked the same.  Day Three was foggy and cold - you couldn't see the buildings across the street.  But...we'd all read Arthur's Family Vacation, so we knew that even it rained you could still find a way to have fun. 

At the end of Day One, Cora said "This was the best day ever!  We went to two children's museums, rode the carousel, had popcorn and ice cream for lunch, went swimming, had pizza in an old train station for dinner and got to see a lighthouse!"  Whew!  It was a busy day!

Day Two was cold and rainy in the morning, so we stayed in and swam at the hotel pool most of the morning.  After Willa's afternoon nap, the sun kinda-sorta came out...well...it stopped raining at least.  It was in the low 70s and we figured that it would be too cold to swim/get in the water, but we headed to the beach anyway.  While we were there, the sun came out more, it was beautiful weather (for about an hour and half before the fog rolled in), the water was nice....but we didn't bring our suits.  To heck with that - we went in anyway!  (All but Ian who had a hard time having any fun because all he could think was the mess that the sand would make in the car...what a fun-hater!)

Day Three was foggy, and about 58 degrees!, but we headed to the sand dunes about a  half-hour south along the lake.  Cora and Evaline were troopers as they scaled a few dunes so steep they had to crawl on all fours.  Willa was in a hiking back-pack on Ian's back....and she didn't care for it one bit.  So she screamed for the 45 minutes we were there.  We headed back to town to have a picnic lunch and run through the huge splash pad.  The weather did get the best of us for that however.  We all needed jackets for the picnic as the wind was pouring in off the lake.  We opted for a few turns on the carousel in exchange for the splash pad, and then headed back to the hotel for more swimming.  

So despite the crappy weather, we had a lovely first family vacation.  And I believe that this view of the backseat on the way home is all the proof we need: