Thanks to my “notifications” requests, we were able to secure a site at Muskegon State Park, another of Michigan’s very popular lakeside parks. You put in your requested campground and what dates you need, and they will notify you if something opens up—and often, something does.

And Muskegon is very nice. There are two campgrounds—the Lake Michigan campground, which sits directly above the shore, and where you can access the Lake Michigan beach by a long stairway, and the Channel Campground, which we got. The channel campground sits right on Lake Muskegon, which is connected to Lake Michigan by a man-made causeway. They are renovating the walkways, so we could not walk directly from our campground to the Lake Michigan shore, but there was plenty to see, as there is a lot of traffic through there, including some large freighters and a twice-daily ferry across the lake.

Love those tugboats! And there were great hiking trails up behind the campground, which led to some spectacular views of the lakes (Michigan and Muskegon) and the “back dunes” landscape.

Cool, huh?

PLUS, I found some mushrooms I’ve been wanting to see. Behold the Water Measurer:

Aren’t they cool? They look like scattered stars in the sand. As an added bonus, there were other members of the puffball mushroom family:

The camp hosts were great, there were lots of birds to see on my early morning walks with Moe, and there was a pretty little beach just a short walk from our campsite. The only odd thing was, our neighbor’s tent kept making me hum “Do You Want To Build a Snowman” from Frozen.

Couldn’t figure out why. Then it hit me: