Unplug & Catch Up
Sleeping Bear Dune National Lakeshore (MI)
I flew into Detroit at 4pm local time. I was picked up from curbside and 5+ hours later, Ben, Julia, and I were at Sleeping Bear Dune National Lakeshore, White Pines to be exact.
There’s something nice about arriving into a new place and immediately unplugging from the world. I had no knowledge of the area, so they were playing my tour guide—sharing odd MI facts and stories from their previous camping trips in that area. We almost ran over a few deer and porcupines on our way to the camp site.
When we got to camp that night, we stayed up late, catching up with each other over a bottle of Jameson. Ben, Julia, and I go way back—back to our VCU days. These are two of my favorite people in the world. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, it’s guaranteed 100% good times.
We did a lot during our two days at White Pines; we explored the region, star-gazed at night, hiked, climbed sand dunes, found no morel mushrooms, cooked bomb ass dinners that took hours to make, ate fish sausage, built awesome camp fires, and answered the question “What keeps you up at night?”
I am reminded by a quote from R.W. Emerson when I think of my close friends and the bonds we share,
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
