We had many good times during the fifth annual Mini Lite Great Lakes Rally. So many, that I didn’t even take time to tell you about them. So here I am, trying to get you caught up with our adventures.

Friday

We started the day with breakfast that included fresh bread that Harry and Deb Conant brought us from Mackenzies Bakery in Vicksburg, Michigan. They actually brought us two loaves, so we had to split them and freeze some of each loaf. I know that sort of defeats the point of fresh bread, but we won’t eat it fast enough to stay fresh anyway. Today, though, Tony cut each of us two slices of bread. On one slice, we finished off the jar of blackberry jam that Manya gave us in December.  The other slice made an open-face SPAM and egg sandwich. It was a breakfast fit for royalty!

In the early afternoon, when we were all ready, we carpooled with Kathy and Steve Royce, and Tony and Tina Armeni of TNT RVing, and we went to lunch at Crane’s Pie Pantry in Fennville, Michigan. We were interested because they have flights of pie. They also have a winery, but we didn’t do any wine tasting. Tina did have a glass of Chardonnay and enjoyed it.

We ordered various sandwiches for our lunches, not wanting to eat too much and spoil our flights of pie! I had a really tasty turkey pesto melt. I ate half, and saved half for my dinner. Tony had a pot roast sandwich with lots of melty Swiss cheese on an onion roll. We shared bites and agreed that neither of us made a bad decision.

The pie flights, unfortunately, are pre-determined flavors. I might would have chosen the four that were offered anyway. Tony wasn’t interested in the flight because the pies are basically all fruit pies. He was, naturally, hoping for a peanut butter pie or some other cream pie options. Instead, he had a couple of their apple cider donuts. He declared the texture of the plain donut to be absolute donut perfection.

I had the flight of pies, which included apple, blueberry, cherry, and raspberry-rhubarb. I can remember my mom making strawberry-rhubarb pie when I was little, and wanted to taste that nostalgia. All of the pies were pretty good; the general consensus was that the blueberry was the crowd favorite.

The guys bought some goodies to take back to camp. Tony and Tina went back to camp and we rode with Steve and Kathy to Aldi to pick up some ingredients for our planned Bloody Mary and Mimosa breakfast the next morning. On the way back to camp we stopped at the very convenient The Fields Store, and Steve and Tony found beers from Saugatuck Brewing that they had been talking about. We got back and tried out the peanut butter porter and the Neapolitan milk stout. How a beer can taste like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry is beyond me but trust me, it does!

We saw one of the most - um, - unique (I really want to say weird) setups we have seen in the camping universe. It was a Mercedes C Class car towing a truck topper on a trailer. Now maybe it was a tool kit for some job they do, but we assumed it was a homemade teardrop-style trailer and we got a kick out of the ingenuity of the whole set-up. The longer I look at the photo, the stranger it gets!

We also drove through the parking lot at South Haven’s South Beach. We saw a sailboat in the lake, and also were intrigued by the elevated walkway leading to the lighthouse. When we asked later, Jeff explained that walkway would have a building at the land end, and is the way to access the lighthouse in the winter when the regular pier is buried in snow. Wow!

In the evening we once again gathered at the Brown’s site for a meetup and to talk about the official rally activities the following day. And we once again snuck out well before the party was over.

Saturday

We slowly got the day going by preparing to gather for Bloody Marys and mimosas. We did have some breakfast first, Tony fried SPAM and we shared a scone from Crane’s. Tony fried bacon on the griddle with some of the green chili seasoning we had received from Paul and Cindy at Quartzsite. Meanwhile, Steve and Kathy and Tony and Tina brought their contributions over.  The boys had fun piling their drinks with pickles, olives, celery, bacon, and I don’t even know what else. The girls poured mimosas and we all chatted and told more lies - er, I mean, true camping stories.

At 1:00 we all gathered at the pavilion to have a meet-up with ABC Upfitters. Ben Miller and Scott Herman brought the mock-up power package and described it, then answered group and individual questions about how an upfit would fit into each represented model of Mini Lite present. Throughout the next day, we welcomed several people to look at our installed system.

At 3:00 we set up our recording equipment and invited the group to join us in recording this week’s podcast episode. We asked them to share their best and worst camping memories. A lot of people were shy and didn’t get up to tell tales, but a few brave souls shared with us. You’ll hear that on the June 13 podcast episode.

Afterwards, we packed up and took the recording stuff back to the trailer, and changed our shirts for the group photo, dinner, and raffle. Steve Comstock set up the camera and managed to get the whole giant group, about 65 of us, into the picture! Our timing was pretty good too; not long after we gathered under the pavilion for dinner, the rain started coming down. It was relentless for a good while!

Tony wasn’t feeling well so he went back to camp after the group photo. We had pork, chicken, beans, and salads for dinner. Also, there were really cute cookies, including cookies decorated like Mini Lites! So fun!

We won a set of Stephen Comstock’s photo bookss in the raffle! He promised to autograph them for us.

My back had what I believe was a spasm. It really hurt, for a few days. Someone said it’s too bad I don’t have a TENS muscle stimulator, and I remembered that I DO have one! So when I got back after dinner Tony helped me put it on my back. It really helped a lot.  By morning I felt almost back to the normal, constant pain that I’ve learned to live with.

Sunday

We made the tough decision not to go from here to mooch dock with the Conants. We were really looking forward to spending time with Harry and Deb. Unfortunately, we have been having lots of fun, and as a consequence we have not been keeping up with our work. We decided that staying here at the campground with nobody to play with would be the smarter plan.

We walked over to the campground office, and then wandered around a bit to find a few optional sites that we thought would give us good Starlink. The site we were in was already booked so we knew we had to move. We also needed to dump the waste and fill the fresh tank anyway, so moving was sort of inevitable. As we walked past the dump station, we were glad not to be waiting in that line - a lot of campers were leaving today.

Later, I was walking to the new campsite to see it again, and I saw a poor little bird nest and a broken egg on the ground. I know the “circle of life” and everything but it was still sad to see that broken egg. Otherwise I could have convinced myself that the babies had all managed to fledge.

We had planned to explore South Haven with Steve and Kathy, but everyone was feeling a bit lazy so we just sat around camp and told stories. In the afternoon, we felt energetic enough to at least make the trek into town to visit Sherman’s Dairy Bar and get some ice cream. Sherman’s slogan, and our advise, is “do yourself a flavor.” If you are ever in the area, try the ice cream at Sherman’s Dairy Bar. It is delicious! We went with the flight concept again. Only this time we got to choose our flavors. Six of them! We tried chocolate peanut butter, salted caramel, cake batter (with ultra-sweet blue frosting), yellow cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate malted, and fudge chunk.

There was also a quick trip to Aldi to get some veggies for dinner. Because that would totally offset the ice cream, right?

We prepared some pork chops while Steve and Kathy prepped potatoes and fresh veggies. We finally made good on our promise to burn the paper towels that had been left in the fire pit by the previous campers. Then Steve burned some charcoal briquets and set up a grill to hold the cast iron skillet the veggies would cook in.

Dinner was terrific, and we were all too full to make pie iron apple pies - which meant we also didn’t dig into the quart of salted caramel ice cream we had brought home.

Summer is funny, and more so the further north you go. We didn’t realize the passing of time until we were cleaning up after our delicious dinner, and it was nearly 9:00 already! We said goodnight and they headed for their camp. We finished cleaning up. Just before we crawled into bed, we remembered that we had wanted to try rotating the mattress so we did that. No time like the present, I suppose.

PS - we think the rotation was a good idea. We feel like we slept better with the adjustment.