An Overdue Post & Farewell for Now
I launched Love Our Great Lakes in February 2023 as an outlet to explore my burgeoning interest in the Great Lakes. For three years, I consistently posted every other week, as I had stated I would. And I loved it. But in recent months, as you may have noticed, I have not been posting.
While I did not post this summer of 2026, I had some wonderful Great Lakes adventures and completed almost all of my Great Lakes summer intentions.
#1: Visiting Door County, Wisconsin with my girls and my parents in June. Next level Great Lakes! We loved staying in Bailey’s Harbor on the quieter, eastern side of the peninsula on Lake Michigan. But we also loved some adventures on the Green Bay side: A trolley ride and tour out of Egg Harbor. A boat ride out of Sister Bay and up to “Death’s Door” at the northern end of the peninsula. And this banger of a sunset we caught one evening after pizza in Fish Creek.
#2: Visiting Sutton’s Bay and Elk Rapids, Michigan on Northern Michigan camp drop-off weekends. Both total charmers! Sutton’s Bay is on the western arm of Grand Traverse Bay. Elk Rapids is on the eastern arm. Sutton’s Bay felt like a gateway to the Leelenau Peninsula. Before having lunch, we drove up for a hike of Clay Cliffs Natural Area, which offered viewpoints out over Lake Michigan toward the Manitou Islands. Conversely, Elk Rapids felt like a gateway to the region in Northern Michigan know as Chain of Lakes, the lakes in reference being beautiful inland ones.
#3: Attending a gathering for the Alliance for the Great Lakes at the new Cleveland Metroparks & Cleveland Foundry Sailing Center at East 55th Street. Our spectacular park system has done it again with this facility. Modern and sleek with an eating establishment making it a worthwhile stop for food or a launching spot for the Mandel bike and recreational trail along the shore.
#4: Completing two beach clean-ups at Euclid Beach Reservation with the Cleveland Metroparks. This has become a place that I know well intimately, down to this flower that often peeks out from the sand and rock.
#5: A day trip adventure to Ashtabula, Ohio for a picnic at the beach with good friends, and an exploration of a small downtown area. I can’t recommend it as a destination, but it is a downtown with some local stores that are striving to make it. I’m always going to cheer for the strivers. I purchased a small stained glass lighthouse from a gallery and we enjoyed local ice cream.
Unfortunately, my husband and I did not get in our kayak. We were registered and excited for an evening outing with 41 Degrees North Coastal Adventures on July 2nd. But that week we had a massive heat wave in our region, with temps even into the evening up near 100. We decided that we would not be happy out on the water. Not a bad thing to have something on the list for the future!
And now, we’re deeply in the fall and the feeling of change that this season brings. At this moment, I find myself in the rush hour years of life. My girls, who were 5 and 10 at launch are now 9 and almost 14. Our calendar is full of extracurricular, family and community engagements. We also added a third “girl” to our family this past summer when we brought a puppy home. My full-time job remains busy. To fit all these things together, I exercise very early in the morning, and so, well, I’m tired at night! In the past year I’ve found myself craving time to read with the slivers of time I have.
One of the books that I’ve read in the past two years is Four Thousand Weeks:Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. The thesis of the book: That there is a liberation and clarity found when one accepts the limitations of our human life. And in that vein, there can be a joy in closure and acceptance of the limitations of time, energy, investment.
Reflecting back something that I wrote in April after taking stock of Great Lakes happenings in the winter and early spring: It felt like I have made a home for myself in this space and this place.
Realization now in October: Maybe that was the goal of this blog, at this moment of life, and I’ve met it for the time being.
With that perspective, I think it is time to close my blog for now. I’m going to keep my domain name in case I’d like to use it further at some point. I am very proud of my efforts in late 2022 and 2023 to learn how to, technically, launch a blog and navigate the basics of WordPress. In fall 2024 I continued to learn about blog tools and widgets and upgraded to a new hosting service and theme.
However, as we’re all very aware, the technology world marches on and waits for no one. There is effort involved to keep pace with WordPress, and while small, not totally insignificant cost for licenses and subscriptions. While I don’t have my pulse on the full picture, anecdotally, I believe that it’s been a challenging 18 months for bloggers with changes to google algorithms and the expansive adoption of AI chatbots that provide summaries of content instead of search engines that bring people to content.
I will forecast one possibility. If I find that I am truly missing this creative outlet, I may start writing on Substack. It’s the one social media platform that I enjoy interacting with; I do think it’s “my people” on Substack (I’m also on LinkedIn if you want to find me). Doing that would release me from the need to keep up with a technical platform and would deliver my writing in a newsletter format directly to an in-box.
Readers, please know that I will not be sharing your email address with any external party. As I close up my Constant Contact account, I will keep a record of subscribers in the case that I decide to write on Substack. If I do, I will send you one notification in case you’d like to continue reading my Great Lakes content.
Please take good care of yourself. If you are thinking about a vacation, think very hard about the Great Lakes region! I still think, as I did when I started the blog, that the Great Lakes are tremendously under-recognized. Five hidden gems, if you will.
If you’d like to keep up with Great Lakes news, needs, and support non-partisan, non-profit advocacy on behalf of the largest freshwater system on earth, I would refer you to the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
With much love and appreciation,
Ellie
