Friday August 6, 2021

Day #12

Silver Lake was our tour destination today, with our first stop at the Chick Shack, a popular wing restaurant downtown.  The restaurant was surrounded by amusement park rides – roller coaster, race cars, a pond with bumper boats and a putt-putt mini golf. Gary Huber did not steer us wrong with the wings as you can tell by Doug’s face!

Doug's expression when we got our order of wings! I wonder which employee was counting to out the 12 wings for our order.

The wings were cooked on a rotisserie, then you could pick the flavor of BBQ sauce.  We really think that boxes were mixed up when packing the carry-out bags. 

After our surprisingly delicious lunch, we trekked down to Mac Wood’s Dune Buggy Rides. This business had been in operation for 91 years. This is the 1934 Dune Scooter they now have stored in their museum, along with this model used in 1960.

We rode in their current model, the Sand Witch. Crossing Termite Bridge, we entered the wooded area of the dunes, but soon was on the up and down sandy dunes.

The experience is difficult to describe and the video is not really doing the ride justice. The kids were loving the ride, you can hear them in the back ground. The driver/emcee, Chris did a great job with informational stops, driving fast and making the ride exciting. Several of the hills felt that there was nothing there but space, until you started down the other side. 

Halfway through the ride, we had a  minute to stop on the beach of Lake Michigan, where we took photos, looked at the rocks smooth by the waves rolling them in the sand.

One of the informercial stop, Chris talked about the sand and how lightening strikes cause the sand to melt – made me think of “Sweet Home Alabama”. The trees that you see are the tops of 30–40-foot Popular trees – this is caused by “live sand” – areas in the dunes that sand is constantly shifting by the winds. Dead sand are those areas that because of grass and other small shrubs the sand does not move no matter how hard the wind blows.

I did not video the last dune that we went over. Chris stopped at the top of a dune as we were looking across Silver Lake at the beach on the opposite side. (I think I posted a picture yesterday of the dunes across the lake where you can see a flag on top of a dune, we were at that flag.) My first thought when he stopped was that the front wheels were teetering over the edge of the dune. Just like a roller coaster, he had everyone raise their hands, building the anticipation to continue on the ride down the 80-90 foot straight down dune.

Next door to the dune rides was Whippy Dip, an ice cream shop, except it looked like everyone had the same idea. So we drove down the road to Tasty Creations and was rewarded with Country Dairy Ice Cream!