Silver Lake- A New Perspective

 
Today was a wonderful surprise gift. It was supposed to be raining, the end of our nice weather. Instead we had another blue sky, mild day. I was out doing assignments.

One of the best parts of this job is that I often get to enter private communities which gives me the chance to see views from perspectives usually denied to the public. Often this involves bodies of water because people like their private lakeshore homes.

This time I got to see the south end of Silver Lake, the one with the really big and bare sand dunes. These views work you around the end of the lake. This one just said "north" to me.



The very end where the shoreline turns is marshy. Pretty typical of small lakes.



Working north again on the far side, there was still late fall color to enjoy. I like the rusts and golds as well as the earlier, brighter colors.



And finally, the long view, showing you how far down the lake those bare dunes are. They are the dominant feature of the public areas. Here, not so much. Just about a mile from the Silver Lake shore, up over the dunes and down the back side, is Lake Michigan. One small creek drains from the end pictured here out into the big lake.



And, just because I was at a location on Lake Michigan again today, it was in a mood for changes. Waves moving in. A cold wind off the water that made me put on my coat. Sand fence already installed to slow the drifting. Today was also the last day of the sailing season for the S.S.Badger. The Great Lakes are known for bad November storms that take ships down. They always stop running the ferry at the end of October.



That next season is on its way!

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Silver Lake

 
Silver Lake is a beautiful local lake with one of the longest stretches of bare dunes along the Michigan Shore, between Silver Lake and Lake Michigan.



That said, it's one of my least favorite places to go in the summer. The DNR has decided that these dunes will be dedicated to motorized recreation. There are commercial dune rides, places for private citizens to ride their own or rented dune buggies. The small community that has grown up around the tourist business is wall to wall people and noise all summer. The state park tent sites are like side-by-side bedrooms.



However, after the summer people leave, it can be almost restful.

Like anywhere else on a lovely lake, the cottages and starter castles encroach as close as possible to the public land.



We used to deliver papers here. If the papers were late and we got there after 7 am the traffic was so bad it really made for slow deliveries.

But yesterday, I had a case to do near here, and stopped to enjoy the more natural feel of the post-tourist season.

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The World's Smallest, Most Annoying Roundabout?

 
Bad intersections never seem to have good solutions. When I was growing up, north of Ithaca, New York, the intersection at the bottom of Cliff St was called "the octopus." It had seven roads coming together, three of them down steep hills, and was a constant location for bad accidents.

Fifty or so years later, it's undergone countless redesigns, and I guess has fewer accidents, but if you don't know which road you want to get to, heaven help you to get from one place to another through there.

Locally, this isn't THAT bad, but well... Let me show you.

In Silver Lake, Michigan was an annoying intersection with only four streets, but they were not at right angles, and most anything that wasn't a street was the parking lot of a business including a gas station. It was pretty much "anything goes" for vehicles.

A couple of years ago, someone decided this was the solution.



Yes, there is now a roundabout in place, also known in some places as a rotary. Michigan has VERY few of them.

So... drivers coming upon this little gem sometimes have no clue what's happening until they find their car propelled (hopefully) around (instead of across) a small circle.

First of all, this rotary is so small that it must be nearly impossible for delivery trucks to negotiate. Here's a car-level view as you enter. You can see that the straight-across street is only a small bump out of alignment. It must be the smallest street-legal size for one of these things. Anyone entering too fast would slam head-first into the flower bed wall.



It's so small that you don't have time to put on your blinker to signal where you are going to exit, so no one bothers.

It's so small that the exits aren't marked, so you need to know where you are going.

The lovely decorative star flower bed is rather a lost cause. I've taken the first picture from the highest nearby point that isn't the roof of a building. That point is from a private park that isn't open to the public (I snuck in early morning, ya know.) I guess it would be attractive from an airplane.

I don't think this is one of the highway engineering successes of the century.

Just one more day of paper route and I'm thoroughly crabby and so DONE with it. I'm going to bed now.

Is this a positive post? I can't tell. I think of it (the roundabout) as something of a joke.

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I Never Would Have Seen These If...

 

...I hadn't had to do the paper route. Here are some of the best images from these early mornings. Om is home, the job is his again, and I won't really miss it a bit!
Although I started in the dark each day, the papers come late enough that the sun rises while I'm doing the route. Regular readers know that I'm not great with morning, so a nice sunrise is definitely a perk of the paper route. This is taken across the Pentwater River.



There was actually a pair of mallard ducks sneaking around the corner of a convenience store. The attraction was a broken bag of corn- see some of it loose near the female's feet. She was enjoying a good snack. Her mate wanted to join in, but a large truck pulled in just then and he flew away in fright. She followed him in a minute as I pulled out.



At the very end of the route is the whole Silver Lake resort area. These open dunes have been pretty much given over to the motor sport crowd for decades. I guess if that population has to be served recreationally, it's best to keep it in one area. But the dunes sure are pretty in the morning sun.



I caught this swan showing off. The rest of the family was nearby, but I couldn't get a good picture of them. Interestingly, the cygnets were the usual brown "ugly duckling" color, which makes me totally curious about those fluffy swan babies I saw in Mackinac City



Finally, here is some sweet pea that I actually stopped on the freeway to look at. This time of year the roadsides here are covered with this plant. It's not native, actually a garden escape from colonial gardens. But this patch caught my eye because the color is much deeper than it usually is here. A much more typical color is ordinary pink, fading to pale pink and rarely white.

See Fluffy Treats on an Urban Trail for the cygnets
See Paper Bag with Fish- at the end are a couple of pix from one February morning of the paper route