Michigan Vacation: Days 1 & 2 Up North

8 days

1200 miles logged in the van

5 beds slept in

6 destinations/outings

$770 spent

1 family vacation to Michigan.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a week since we have been back from our family vacation! We had a BLAST, and I wanted to be able to recap alllll the details in case anyone else wants to take a grand tour of Northern Michigan! If not, just buckle up for our wild ride!

Today I will be recapping our first two days in Michigan- these were really down, chill days that we spent mostly recovering from the craziness that has been our life for the past few weeks/months.

We left Tuesday around noon in order to make it to Michigan in time to attend my Father-in-Laws watch party for the primary elections. For the past two years, he has put tons of work into campaigning and running for the governor of Michigan. Unfortunately, he did not make it through the primaries, but we are proud of him nonetheless! I mean, anyone who can get over 100,000 votes wins in my book! I don’t even think that many people know I exist.

It’s about a five hour drive, and my kids do really well in the car. We really try to avoid electronics, but the car is one place I make an exception. However, we forgot the charger for the laptop so watching shows wasn’t even an option! I’m so glad that I have kids who can easily go five hours without needed technology to entertain them. In fact, we decided that we would have an entirely technology free week…and we did! We watched zero movies, zero TV shows and maybe about 30 mins of cartoons when we stayed in a hotel for one night. And let me tell you what…it was THE BEST.

All that to say, our kids are not angels. They whined and cried and carried on for significant portions of the week. They fought and argued and were ornery and threw temper tantrums. Just because we went without technology does not mean that we have achieved perfect child. On the contrary, they are still very much sinners who we are trying to raise in the knowledge and grace of God.

We arrived in Saginaw just in time to don our t-shirts and head over to the live poll watch party at a neighbors house. We are all so glad to be out of the van, but I was feeling so nauseas from all the driving and the exhaustion that was finally catching up with me.

My Mother in law outfitted us all with these shirts, including a size newborn for the new baby. Unfortunately, Kiah’s shirt was huge and so Theo was very convinced the newborn onesie would fit better. He wasn’t wrong…

When your photographer is three, you take what you get…

The watch party went until pretty late while the polls were collected, and we finally headed over to bed around 11:30. It was a disappointment for the Hines supporters, but like I said…we sure are proud of my Father in Law!

The next morning dawned bright and early and it was a very special day for a very special girl!!! Tera turned FOUR! We saved four chocolate covered strawberries from the night before and she got to eat them for breakfast (she shared with her brother, too).

When we asked Tera what she wanted to do for her birthday, she said she wanted to bake cupcakes, so Grandma obliged and made some cupcakes with/for Tera!

Grandpa and Grandma then took the birthday girl (and her whole family, but we weren’t the important ones) out to lunch at Culver’s! We parted ways after that and our little family of four headed Up North to the lake while my in-laws went to one last campaign event.

It was about this point that I was hit with full-on exhaustion. Not just sleepy and tired, but so tired to my core. We have had some really emotionally strenuous months, and the weeks leading up to this vacation were incredibly physically and emotionally draining.

Thankfully, Theo was a champ this whole vacation and just played with our kids while I sat and did a lot of watching/thinking/reading. It was exactly what we all needed!

We made a quick grocery store run since we knew the lakehouse would be our “home base” for the whole vacation. I quickly menu planned some easy meals that I could make at home so we wouldn’t be eating out every single day. I planned for homemade pizza, tacos, boxed Mac & cheese with hot dogs, and a roasted sweet potato/chicken one pan meal. We also got all our breakfast foods, lunch meat & cheese for lunches and some snack food. We ended up spending nearly $100 on groceries, but it ended up saving us so much money from eating out every single meal, plus we ended up bringing quite a bit of it back with us and are still using it!

We celebrated Tera’s fourth birthday with pizza and some frozen cheesecake we found in the freezer. 😉 We couldn’t find any birthday candles, so we had Tera blow this one out four times. She loved it.

Birthday spankings! Did anyone else’s parents do this to them?

We could barely make it to bedtime, so once we got the kids down, we went to sleep ourselves. I think it might have been 9pm when we were all sound asleep. We were SO EXHAUSTED.

The next morning dawned bright and early, and the kids were ready to spend all their time down by the water!

But first: a family golf cart ride!

We LOVE driving around and looking at all the little lake houses and cabins by the lake. There are even quite a few mansions around the area, which are fun to look at, too!

Shortly before lunch, my in-laws arrived to spend their weekend at the lake, too. My FIL got out the jet ski and everyone went for jet ski rides (except me, thanks pregnancy). I cooked dinner and we had some great conversations and time together as a family.

We are SO THANKFUL for the ability to use the lake house and crash there for free. One of the reasons that we planned our family vacation to Northern Michigan was because we knew we had free lodging. We wouldn’t have been able to enjoy so many other activities if we hadn’t been able to stay here.