One day I was talking to an acquaintance about going camping; she was leaving for a camping trip that weekend and insisted she was going to the best spot in the world. I didn’t even ask where she was going because I knew it couldn’t be as wonderful as our favorite spot for camping, a little piece of heaven. We argued back and forth over which spot was better, little did we know that we were talking about the same part of heaven, Grand Marais, Michigan.
I have been going there with my best friend’s family, the Lepeaks, since I was in grade school. We spent the best vacations in Grand Marais. When Mr. Lepeak retired he built a home and they moved there. It is always a place of rest and relaxation, long walks, wild huckleberry picking, sharing news and renewing friendships. Swimming in THE Great Lake, Superior of course, where we would brave the cold at least once every trip no matter what the temperature.
When I was young and foolish it also meant running down Devil’s Slide, where lumberjacks used to slide logs into the lake. It would take five minutes to run down and a tortuous half hour climbing back up. I realized I had reached maturity the first time I refused to go down.
One of my favorite pictures on my living room wall is one where I am walking with my friend, Janet, at East Shore. We have our heads down, looking for agates, while the sunset transforms the sky into lines of hot pink and tangerine ahead of us.
One summer we decided to meet in Grand Marais with a few very good friends from high school. We brought our husbands and our children and they all fell in love with the lighthouse, the waterfalls, devil’s slide, fireworks, campfires and Mrs. Lepeak’s steaming huckleberry pie. Our children became friends with our friend’s children and our families bonded forever.
Mr. Lepeak put up a wire and a pulley where the kids could sail through the air between the trees. There were races pushing peanuts with their noses and Mrs. Lepeak would tell scary stories to the kids by the campfire. When we returned to our trailers in the campground no one wanted to go to sleep because monsters were everywhere!
Our children are grown now, some have gone off to college, some have graduated, and some have started families of their own. But when they see one of their friends from that camping trip the years slip away and you can see their friendship is as solid as if it were just yesterday when they were riding their bikes through the campground.
We really have been blessed with good friends. They taught us the importance of enjoying God’s gift of nature to us. They taught us to slow down and enjoy life and that everything else stops when the sun sets over the lake. There really is nothing better than a trip to Grand Marais to help you reset your priorities. I decided a long time ago that heaven really is where a day in Grand Marais lasts forever.
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