Pentwater, Michigan
October, 2003

On this trip I flew in from Berlin and Gloria flew in from Kauai and we met in Detroit. From there we drove to the small town of Pentwater, which sits on the edge of Pentwater Lake and boasts a channel that connects it to Lake Michigan. We moved into "The Candlewyck House," a restored farmhouse built in 1865 that features themed rooms and scrumptious food. Our place of rest was called "The Patriot Room" because it was crammed to the rafters with so many patriotic doodads that we had no space to put our things on. The hospitality, however, was unequalled.

Gloria's sister Joan, who lives there with her husband Dick, served as our guide, and most of the rest of her family came up to join us as well.

This is a typical street in Pentwater. It has the look, the feel, and the neighborliness of Brighton or South Lyon in the fifties when Gloria and I were in high school.

A spectacular maple tree that really wanted its picture taken.

This gorgeous variety of trees and shrubs in color is on the road into town.

Many of the homes had Halloween decorations on their porches or in their yards. Almost all the homes were early American, Victorian, or Colonial in style, and a lot of them had been built in the mid to late 1800s.

Gloria's sister Joan is showing off her decorations, as well as a very large cabbage from a local farm.

Sometimes we would just lounge around, like Gloria's sisters Joan and Lorraine.

We also went walking along the famous sand dunes of Lake Michigan.

Here is part of the Denkhaus clan making the sands bark. These are called "barking sands" (like the ones in Hawaii) because the air-saturated sand makes sounds like barking dogs (very small dogs) as you shuffle through them.

Gloria's brother Dennis and his wife Sandy came up in their awesome 42-foot motorhome. It barely fit into a space at Charles Mears State Park on Lake Michigan at the edge of town.

One day all of us went to visit the Little Sable Point Lighthouse, the highest one on Lake Michigan at 115 feet.

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