August 9, 2012 - Dunesday

Today was international cousin fun day in the world of Kelley, Lisa, and Jill.  As I mentioned before, we made a summer bucket list at the beginning of the summer and most of the stuff on it was easy stuff like getting popcorn balls and such haha :).  Our biggest list item was the Indiana Dunes!!!!  And we finally crossed that off our list TODAY!!!!!  We planned on leaving at 7 in the AM so Kelley and I woke up at 6.  After showers and breakfast, Jill was at our house but we weren't ready to leave yet.  After getting everything together and Kelley did my hair, we ended up leaving at 8.  It was all good, though, because we weren't in a hurry to get there.  Jill drove because she's awesome and because her car gets the best gas mileage.  The dunes are only about two hours away from us so we ended up getting there a little after 10!  Today was about 70 degrees outside and it was overcast and drizzling a little bit so there weren't that many people at the beach.  When we got there, we decided to pee and then we followed a trail.  The trail was made out of sand so we went barefoot and it was super nice on our feet.  There was also nice stairs and walkways built along the trails for the parts that were not easy to walk through.  Here's a picture of the stairs winding their way through the sand and trees:

They go very far off into the distance!  If you just keep looking, you'll keep seeing more steps!!!  After we got to the end of the walkway, we saw this very steep path that led to a top of a hill and we weren't sure if we were allowed to climb it so we did it anyway.  It ended up being super hard to climb the hill since it was literally 90 degrees straight up.  Here was the view we saw when we got to the top:

We did see some of the lake from up there but I have better pictures of it later soooo I'll put the better ones on instead.  This is a picture of the steep hill after we had conquered it:

So steep!  The way down from the top of the hill was super fun because if you ran, then you FLEW down!!  It was seriously so much fun to bound down and would be worth the crazy hike up just to go back down again!!  After the hill, we walked our way farther down the trail until we reached the beach!

So beautiful!!  For those that don't know, the Indiana Dunes are on Lake Michigan and let me tell you how much Lake Michigan freaks me out!!  I seriously cannot wrap my head around how a lake can be as gigantic as that!  It seriously looks like an ocean!!!  I don't understand...  Anyway, we put our feetsies in the lake and it ended up being pretty warm!:

If it wasn't overcast and rainy, we would have swum and we even brought our swimmy suits today to swim but we decided against it.  And Lake Michigan has been  having crazy riptides (or whatever they're called) lately so maybe it was a good thing we didn't swim?
After a quick feet dunking, we went back to the car and ate our lunch.  We had the most magical grapes in all of existence and it was crazy!  It was seriously like eating candy!  We couldn't stop ourselves from eating them!!!
After lunch, we headed east in search for Mt. Baldy!!!  Mt. Baldy is the biggest dune at the Indiana Dunes and it was the farthest east and in the pictures above we were at West Beach.  We saw a map that told us where we were and where Mt. Baldy was and when we measured it out we realized we couldn't walk to it because once we reached 8 miles on the map and still weren't there, we decided we should drive there instead.  So we hopped in the car and off we went!!  It was super confusing trying to find our way there.  We learned the hard way that many of the things in the town was named with the word "dune" in it and that does not necessarily mean it'll take you to a dune!!!!  Jill drove around a subdivision for a very long time as we were all really confused as where the road was taking us hahaha :)  Eventually we decided to go to a visitor's center so Jill could get a postcard and Kelley and I could get a patch.  We typed it in our GPS and after the first visitor's center was closed, it led us to the second one.  I ended up falling asleep while we drove to the second visitor's center and I woke up when I got there.  There were no postcards for Jill but Kelley and I did get a patch and Jill got a nice magnet for her new fridge!!  Then we looked at a map to see how far away we were from Mt. Baldy.  Since none of us really knew how to get there, we decided to ask the man behind the counter and that job landed to me.  I didn't want to ask him how to get to Mt. Baldy because, let's face it, that name is completely ridiculous, so I just pointed to the map instead haha.  The guy was super nice and ended up giving us a bigger and better map and the directions to Mt. Baldy weren't that bad!!!  At one point he said he could show us a route that will take us through a bunch of subdivisions on a scenic route and we would be saying "where am I?" the whole time and we laughed because we had already been doing that :)  Also, apparently while I was asking the guy how to get to Mt. Baldy, there was another lady asking someone where she could find the dunes which we all found super hilarious :D
After we left the visitor's center, we eventually made it to where Mt. Baldy was!!!!!!  We missed the turn down the road that was supposed to drive us along the lake but it was okay because we ended up taking that on the way home!  There were a lot of warnings at Mt. Baldy about strenuous hikes along the trails and they were telling us to bring water and such because the trail could be exhausting.  It ended up not being that strenuous at all...our hike up the steep hill before was so much harder!!!  But we did make it to the top of Mt. Baldy!!:

Here's the view of the lake from the top!!!  The POD is also a picture of us at the top of Mt. Baldy!!!  After our climb, we decided to go back to the car and get our towels and books so we could lay on the beach and read.  We had to take a different trail to get to the beach but eventually we got there:

The water here was a lot colder than at the first beach we were at.  We set down our towels and ate some snacks and then we went to reading.  We all ended up falling asleep on the beach but we were close to a park ranger so we're hoping he was watching over us as we slept.  We all got super cold while we were sleeping so we had to wrap up in our towels in awkward ways to stay warm and so that we could still lay on them.  We took some nice pictures on the beach before heading back to the car!  We were all a tad hungry so we decided to call it an end to a successful day at the dunes!
The car ride home was very intense because we hit Chicago traffic and we were stuck in stop/go traffic for over an hour!!  We stopped at Chipotle to get some food in our tums and then we made our way home!
Jill stayed and watched Bridesmaids with us since she had never seen it before and she loved it!  Yay!  And then she went home and we all went to bed!!!  Yay for a successful dunesday!!!!!  We are definitely going back there again someday!