Coast Guard Festival – Grand Haven

Every summer when August rolls around on the calendar, you can be certain of having something to do on the shores of Lake Michigan. The annual Coast Guard Festival is held every year in Coast Guard City. The week long event has the beach, the sun, thousands of boats, even more people, fireworks, music, events and on and on.

It seems the whole west side of the state heads to Grand Haven at some point during the week of festivities. If you grew up anywhere near Grand Haven you are sure to have memories and pictures of your time partaking in the action.

If you’ve never been, head towards the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, stay for the sunset, take some pictures and laugh about how far away you had to park!

Go to the Coast Guard Festival website here.

The Michigan Left

Visitors to our state at times can’t seem to grasp turning right, going straight, and finally basically doing a u-turn to get heading the direction they originally wanted to go. In so many ways it seems dumb, it seems stupid and it has costs some failures on driving tests due to running red lights they did not see.

The Michigan Left however is quite effective on busy roads. If you think about it, how many times have you watched a light turn green, then yellow then red and you didn’t move at all it seems it the left turn lane. And of course everyone is wanting to turn left and the bus in front is using the whole freaking light to turn left. So it does speed up the flow of traffic even though in some spots it adds an extra light.

Some Michiganders choose to pretend they don’t know what the Michigan Left is and do a normal left turn at a light, this often is scary for the passengers in the car who are used to going right, straight and then the u-turn to go left.

So strangers to the mitten, embrace your time with the odd left turn, think of it as a round-about that is odd and out of place here in the US, but the Europeans just love them. Yes, think of us Michigan Left turners as your crazy Europeans friends who love to use circle round-abouts to make their turns at intersections. Personally I enjoy Round-abouts.

And as the saying goes, you know you are from michigan if you use the phrase “Michigan Left” while giving directions. If you ain’t from around these parts, don’t be afraid to ask what that means!

We love our links

I am not an avid golfer, I do admire some of the amazing courses that have been shaped and molded into the Michigan landscape. Truly works of art.

What gets me is that, Michigan, land of 3 months of sun (although that is arguable), ranks in the top 3 states in the U.S. with the most golf courses. Michigan is only beaten by, California and Florida. Which if we beat either of those states would be madness to me.

How does Michigan fund that many courses? It really is amazing to me, it would take years to golf every available course, and most like by the time you started the quest some would go in and out of business and a few new ones would be added to the list I imagine.

The selection of courses you could choose to play is quite an array. There are par 3’s, there PGA level courses, there are hidden gems, there are mom and pop courses, and there are landmark, destination resorts. I would say the most awesome course Michigan offers would be Arcadia Bluffs. That course has to be Michigan’s Pebble Beach.

So if you’d like to spend your weekends, playing the links in Michigan, have a great time. Drink the cold ones and hit some great shots. If, like me, you can think of other ways to spend 4-5 hours get extremely frustrated, maybe one of these days should be spent at the links and enjoying a beautiful part Michigan has to offer.

If you’d like to see the top 50 public golf courses, click here.