Van Wesep Ventures

June 4-8, 2010
Muskegon State Park - Channel Campground

School's out for the summer - what a better way to celebrate than to go camping right?
We have always wanted to get a site at this campground right on the channel and were fortunate enough to get a reservation for one this weekend. It was wonderful.

School may be out - but the learning never stops. Nicholas found some bricks on our site and started to play with them. Before I know it, I had him experimenting with different things as he tried to life the heavy brick with a stick. He was learning about leverage. He moved his fulcrum closer to the brick and then farther away and even tried making it taller to see what would make the brick easier or harder to lift.

Friday afternoon before we left for camping, I made a quick stop at the library. Normally, the kids are with me to pick out their books - but today I just grabbed some that I thought they would like. Apparently Nicholas liked this book I picked, he carried his chair up by the channel and sat their reading for at least 30 minutes.

Muskegon Lake was cold, but apparently warm enough for the kids because they loved having the opportunity to swim.

Paul decided to challenge the kids and they all agreed to try to climb this massive dune that we pass when entering the park. We have talked of trying to climb it for several years, but this year we actually did.

Almost there Sam...

The view from the top

From the bottom of the dune, you can see this heart made out of sticks. When we reached the top, we decided to move the sticks around. Instead of a heart - we made it into a 6 for the Van Wesep 6 to prove that we were there. When we got to the bottom, it wasn't as obvious that it was a 6 as we had hoped, but we knew it was.

Going down was much more fun than going up.

On the way back, our legs were feeling really heavy. However, there was a pretty decent sized dune yet to be climbed before we got all the way back to the road. Our legs were really burning as we climbed - but we triumphed!

The next day, we decided to do a short hike back in the woods. When we got out of the truck, Sam proceeded to walk right through a puddle in his canvas tennis shoes. Obviously, his feet and socks were now soaking wet. However, we were not going to quit the hike because of this - he was going to have to reap the consequences of his actions. He proceeded to through a nice temper tantrum and laid right down in the middle of trail and stated that he wasn't going anywhere.

The girls -pretending the ferns they found were umbrellas.

Straddling a deep groove in the trail.

Friday night, we started chatting with our neighbors and had a great time visiting them on and off throughout the weekend. We shared with the husband that we were praying that we would see a freighter. Paul loves freighters, but we always seem to get "skunked" whenever we are camping at Channel Campground and have yet to see one when we were there.
He returned from an errand one night and informed Paul that a ship was coming in.
We all got really excited. We were disappointed to learn that it was actually only a barge. Still exciting for the kids to see, but a tugboat pushing a barge is was definately not the 1000 foot ore freighter that we had been hoping for.

Grandma and Grandpa came out to visit on Monday (our last full day there) and brought watermelon. As you can see below - our kids love watermelon.

Grandma and Grandpa left soon after dinner and I started to get the kids ready for bed. A few minutes later, my mom was back. I came out of the trailer just in time to hear here telling Paul that they saw freighter on Lake Michigan. This time, Paul was a bit more hesitant to get excited so he took off on his bike to confirm the report. We were elated to find out that a freighter of unknown size was indeed on it's way to the channel.
The last time we were fortunate enough to actually see a freighter this close was 4 years ago, so the kids really had no concept of what to expect.

Having grown up with a father who practically lived and breathed freighters and made many trips to the Soo Locks Paul knew the trip to getting the ship to blow it's horn. The kids were so excited to help Paul wave "the white towel" (well, the white jacket in this case). However, when the blast actually occurred - Gabrielle broke into tears as it was much louder than she thought it was going to be.

The 704 foot M/V H. Lee White’s name
honors former American Steamship Company chairman, Harris Lee White.

The weekend could not have ended on a more exciting note either - as we were starting to pack up the next morning, Paul looked up and realized that the freighter was headed back out into open water and we got to see it head back out. Once again, we were honored with the blow of the horn, and this time there were no tears.