Great Lakes Beauty

Hi everyone! We have disappeared for a while, leaving the blog abandoned for a month, I feel bad for that and am determined not to do it again. We have been on vacation visiting different places in the US, whose descriptions will soon be described in the next entries. But before that, I want to publish this entry, which was almost finished before our journey, but it finally kept hanging there and never got out. I hope you can enjoy it at last, along with the new updates to come.

Let's start talking about what we did during the Independence Day weekend. Normally, we would have flown somewhere to visit new cities, and extent our list of places we've been. However, this time we decided to take a different approach, and stay in Michigan instead. We thought that, after all, we could not live in a state that we did not visit in our stay here, and after all, there is a lot to see and enjoy in the Great Lakes area.

I will start with an introduction: the Great Lakes are enormous masses of interconnected freshwater, containing 21% of the world's surface fresh water. They are located in Canada and the United States, and their names are Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario. As you can see in the picture below, the state of Michigan is surrounded by the lakes Huron and Michigan.

Looking at the lake from the shore, it is really difficult to realize that it is not the sea, because you don't see the end, it has waves, and there are really beautiful beaches.

These beautiful pictures are from a picture contest organized by the Pure Michigan, you can see more pictures in the link.

Some may say that winter is sad, cold and ugly. In fact, I am glad that this awful winter finally came to an end. However, there is also some beauty present in the pictures from the frozen lakes, and this winter they really pulled it off.

If you like these amazing pictures, you can see them and more in this link


The lakes are very enjoyable because of the beauty and the freedom they give to practice sports like the offer. In fact, our main reason to stay in Michigan for the long weekend was the kite surfing course that we took on the 3rd and 4th of July in Muskegon, at the Lake Michigan. This was Andres' birthday present, he had been looking for it for a long time, and the experience was totally worth it.

Our 2-day course started with good wind. We rapidly took the kites and started practicing its control on the beach, not yet in the water. This is a fun, but skill-demanding sport, I am sure you know what I am talking about if you ever tried it. We sure want to pursue with the sport, and get some practice, now that we live surrounded by lakes, when will we have a better chance!

I had done windsurf in the past, and thought this could somehow be similar. In a way it might be, but certainly the previous experience with windsurf does not help to control the kite, which has a specific logic that needs to be learned.  And in my opinion, kite surfing is harder to learn than windsurfing. Just for fun, I searched for a comparison of both sport, and the practice time you need to learn it. You can see in the graph that kite surfing is hard at first, but after a couple of weeks the learning curve surpasses the one from windsurfing. I guess we are not there yet :)

As said before, we will update soon with our vacation experience in the west coast, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to describe a bit the things that you can do in Michigan, which are plenty and awesome.

Thanks for reading

Lita & Andres