I decided to plan our anniversary trip and surprise Jon with the destination. Well, I planned it and then told him where we were going before hand...so it wasn't a surprise for very long. We waited to go away in September, when everything would be way cheaper after Labor Day. We went to Frankfort, and had (almost) the most beautiful weekend.
Arriving on Friday afternoon. It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny day.
I insisted that we go down to the beach right away. I wanted to enjoy the beautiful weather and watch the sunset from the pier.
The gorgeous sunset.
Saturday, we woke up and it was a rainy, nasty day. We already had plans to go to Traverse City that night, so we decided to just go for the whole day. We ate lunch at the Dish, one of my favorite little restaurants in TC. We also decided to go on a tour of all the wineries on the peninsula. That turned out to be a disaster. The first one was so crowded and we didn't really know what to do, so we ended up getting into a fight and leaving haha. But it all worked out. We did a little shopping and saw a movie at the mall. We later met up with our friend Heidi, for dinner. Heidi went to CMU with us, and I've been trying to get together with her for a couple of years now. She brought her boyfriend, and we all had a great time catching up. It was so, so great to see her. She is such a sweet friend and someone I wish I got to see more often. We ate dinner at North Peak and got ice cream at Moomers after.
Sunday, we woke up and had no agenda, so we ate breakfast and headed to the beach around 10. We spent the whole morning and early afternoon exploring, taking pictures, and walking a pretty long way down the beach.
Jon's idea :)
Jon climbed all the way to the top of this sand dune, while I stayed at the bottom to take pictures.
It was the most beautiful day. No clouds, not too hot, but warm enough that it felt good to walk in the water. I spent a lot of time looking for Petoskey stones.
We used the self-timer on the camera a lot :) There weren't many people around to take our picture.
Here's our room. We had to switch rooms after the second night, but we got a bigger room and bigger bed, so that's ok.
We got ice cream at least once a day. It was really rough...
Last time we went to Frankfort, this was our favorite part, so we had to go watch the waves crash at the end of the pier again. It was a little colder this time.
Soaking wet after standing in the waves. We ended up deciding that we might as well go swimming, since we were already wet. Plus, how could we pass up swimming in Lake Michigan on such a beautiful day. It was pretty chilly, though.
On our way home, we really weren't ready to leave the beautiful Up North, so we took our time and drove down Lake Michigan as far as we could. We stopped at a lookout north of Arcadia. We asked an 80 year-old couple to take our picture, and they told us that they had just gotten married and were on their honeymoon! So cute.
The colors were amazing.
We stopped in Manistee for lunch, and ended up spending another hour walking down the beach. We were really not ready to leave!
We saw so many butterflies on the beach. Most of them were dying though :(
Overall, it was such a great trip. We had mostly amazing weather and it was so relaxing to not have anything to do but walk down the beach. It was also relaxing to know that my sweet sister was taking care of our cat and dog, so we didn't worry about them at all. Thanks Catie!
