Summer is well underway in Ohio, and I have completed three of my six Great Lakes summer intentions. Over Memorial Day weekend, our family packed a picnic and took a day trip to Presque Isle State Park in Pennsylvania, under 90 minutes from Cleveland.

Pennsylvania doesn’t generally appear on the Great Lakes states list. The state’s shoreline is limited with 77 miles along Lake Erie between the Ohio and New York borders. The stretch is notable for two things – the city of Erie and the peninsula that juts out into the lake and has become Presque Isle State Park. 

Presque Isle starts four miles west of Erie and then arches like a scythe to the east, creating Presque Isle Bay on its southern shore. The peninsula’s protection enabled Erie to grow as a natural harbor. Almost all of the peninsula is now the state park and it has 13 miles of roads, 21 miles of recreational trails and 13 beaches.  

Our first stop was the Tom Ridge Environmental Center at the base of the peninsula. We ended up spending over an hour perusing the engaging exhibits.  

The center greatly impresses on you the fact that Presque Isle is in a constant state of geographic and ecologic change. Over time, winds and water have literally blown and pushed the land mass around. Now, of course, some of this change is monitored and managed. This was apparent once in the park when we reached an area off-limits near the North Pier with a gigantic mountain of sand and an official orange state construction sign that I somehow also found lightly charming: Beach Nourishment Underway

At the center I also learned about something I’ve never heard of before. There was a small exhibit with what looked like some broken tree branches inside. They were actually fossilized lightning, also known as fulgurite. On some occasions when lightning strikes the ground, it fuses soil, rock, and sediment together into a tube or clump. Nature’s answer to instant fossilization.    

We drove onto the peninsula. On the mainland it had been bright, sunny and warm; it was notably windier, cooler and foggier as we drove further out in the park. Beaches are sequentially numbered as you make your way out. We drove by the Presque Isle Lighthouse, a popular stop for a visit and photos. We drove by Sunset Point and there were colorful kites of all shapes and sizes, including inflatable ones (mini Macy’s Day balloons!), dancing around in the light fog.

Given the weather, we mostly enjoyed the park on foot, walking some of the trails, seeing the older houseboats that dot Horseshoe Pond, and peeking onto stretches of beach. There were wooded trails and the paved recreational trails that ran right along the shore. I would consider a return to the park some time with bikes; it would also be an ideal place for kayaking and a rewarding setting for birding.

The first weekend of June, I headed downtown on Saturday morning for local non-profit Drink Local Drink Tap’s annual 4 Miles 4 Water event. My parents were visiting that weekend and, wanting to get back to them quickly, I ended up walking the 1 mile event instead of running the 4. The event is very family-friendly and I resolved to return next year with a full team of family and friends.

This year I enjoyed the pre-race atmosphere and the Cuyahoga Riverfront in the early morning hours. It seemed both funny and entirely appropriate that against the backdrop of the DJ’s peppy soundtrack, a gigantic, aged laker ship was slowly navigating the curves of the river with the aid of a tugboat.

This post is dedicated to my mother-in-law Sue whose family has contributed over generations to the city of Erie, PA and who grew up going to the beaches on Presque Isle.

When I tell people about my Great Lakes interest and engagement of the past three years, one of the things I say is that the Great Lakes have been a meaningful anchor for our family as well. It’s been a theme that winds through the year. It’s there all the time, but it’s never more present than in the beautiful summer months in this region.

I have been a long-time listener of the writer Gretchen Rubin’s podcast called Happier. In the podcast she shares and discusses a variety of topics related to happiness. One of the strategies that she has shared a number of times over the years is to “design your summer”. This means: embrace the different cadence of the months and make a plan for the things you want to do to maximize the season. I’ve thought about summers this way for about seven years now, and when fall arrives, I am happy that I was intentional with my time.

With that in mind, here are my Great Lakes intentions for Summer 2024:

#1 Beach Clean-up at Euclid Beach in May: I am a volunteer with the Cleveland Metroparks, and beach clean-ups are one of the many options available for volunteer hours. I love spending 2-hours on a weekend morning this way. The beach and parks are usually quiet, you can listen to music or a podcast and walk the beach or beach adjacent areas and pick-up large and small litter, preventing it from getting washed out into the lake.

#2 Visit Presque Isle State Park, PA over Memorial Day weekend: About a 90 minute drive, this will be an easy day trip for us that we have penciled in for the Sunday of the holiday weekend. Presque Isle State Park is a peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie a couple miles west of Erie, PA. Much of it is sandy beach, but it also has walking trails. We’ll start our visit at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center to learn more. Hopefully the weather will be good and we can pack lunch and head to explore and putter. “Park puttering” is one of my favorite frames for family time. We will hopefully walk some trails, but we might also poke around, hang around..  putter.

#3 Run 4 Miles 4 Water with Drink Local Drink Tap in June: Drink Local Drink Tap is a wonderful non-profit in Cleveland with a mission of solving global water equity through education, advocacy, and community-centered water, sanitation and hygiene projects. Their work engages and educates on water issues at both a local and global level. I will participate in one of their hallmark events that takes place in downtown Cleveland.  

#4 Watch a sunset at the Solstice Steps in Lakewood, OH in July: Lakewood City Park, a couple of miles from downtown Cleveland to the west, is one of my favorite local outings. My girls have always loved the large playground and I love the lakefront location and views. In 2015 the park opened the Solstice Steps, essentially stone bleachers built into a curving hillside at the park. They offer a fantastic view of the lake, especially looking westward. 

#5 Visit a Chicago-area beach over Labor Day weekend: We will be in Chicago over Labor Day weekend for a family event. There will be some time at the margins, and I will hope we can squeeze in a visit to a beach. As I wrote in a previous post about Lake Michigan, in the summer, Chicago really is a beach town.

#6 Visit Lake Erie Bluffs in September: Late August and September are beautiful months here. Many wildflowers and late summer flowers are in bloom. Temperatures are warm but usually not desperately hot. It will be a great time to head to one of my favorite places on Lake Erie, Lake Erie Bluffs park (introduced in my last post). 

I’m sure that some of these activities will provide content for future posts. I will report back! 

And how about you? Do you have a few things in mind you’d like to do this summer? Especially if they are Great Lakes related, but even if not, reach out and let me know what your intentions are. Perhaps taking a moment to share will feel like a gentle accountability mechanism to get them down on the calendar so that when fall comes, a few specific events will make the summer more vivid and memorable.  

What makes an island special?  A couple things come to mind: Given their geographic distinction, islands are sometimes home to rare species or specialized ecosystems and for that reason can be important places of ecological research. They are often rest stops and nesting sites for birds. Islands may, due to their isolation, develop specific cultures among people who live or spend significant time there. And finally, their defining feature – land completely surrounded by water – can provide people with a place of rest and respite.

There are approximately 35,000 islands in the North American Great Lakes. Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the largest freshwater island in the world at 1,068 square miles (it’s 100 miles across!).  This past weekend we spent a day on  a much smaller one – Kelleys Island in Lake Erie (4 square miles). 

It was all the things you want for a day trip – easy drive (90 minutes from our house), easy parking (in Marblehead, OH), and easy ferry ride (22 minutes). The ferry itself was a sensory experience for my girls – wind whipping hair around, the smell of fuel, the sound of the water as the boat cut through it. The famous Cedar Point roller coasters in Sandusky could be seen faintly in the distance, steel curling and arching like ribbon loops.

Upon arrival, we rented a golf cart and puttered north to Kelleys Island State Park. Our first stop was the Glacial Grooves Geological Preserve, the most widely known attraction on the island. In fact, the preserve is home to the most famous glacial grooves in the world and it was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967. They are really quite stunning. Deeply and smoothly carved, the grooves look human-made and not the product of an ice sheet that retreated from the region approximately 14,000 years ago.      

After the grooves, we strolled over to the North Shore Loop Hiking Trail and down to the beach where you can rent kayaks and paddleboards. The girls were very excited about the golf cart and so we took a drive, first circling the eastern part of the island. We ended up finding the Kelleys Island Wine Co. and purchased lunch from the KI Cantina there. We settled into a brightly colored picnic table in the shade. The girls enjoyed looking at the cows and goats in adjacent pastures and watching people play horseshoes. We then circled the western part of the island and landed back at the main commercial area where we popped in some shops before heading back to the mainland. 

A Great Lake + an island + a golf cart + saltwater taffy from Missy Magoo’s Candy and Gift Shop = a solid start to summer.

Where do you retreat from this complex world? How do you “draw back” (the Latin root meaning of the word) to find quiet, distance, perspective and connect with your inner world?

It was a solo retreat in the pandemic winter of 2020-21 that launched my personal relationship with the Great Lakes and established them as a place of rejuvenation and  joy. 

I spent nine and a half months of 2020 at home working full-time with a child or two by my side at various times. As a family, we reconnected with the natural world during our Pandemic Parks Tour of 2020. Between March and December that year, we visited 38 parks in Ohio (city, county, state and Cuyahoga Valley National Park). What else was there to do in those early months with then 7 and 3 year-old children?  

Many parks took us out into the woods and hills of Ohio where the Appalachian region transitions to Midwestern farm lands – truly underrated terrain in my opinion. Some of the parks were on Lake Erie. I have a picture of my older daughter from Labor Day 2020 swimming at the beach at Geneva State Park.  She looks like a Great Lakes mermaid happily lounging in clear, shallow waters stretched across an array of multicolored stones.  

However, by January 2021, the cabin fever in Cleveland was real. I had a singular workday that sent me spiraling. The intensity was a confluence of all the contextual elements of pandemic living, but for the first time in my life, I felt a loss of mental and emotional control. I knew I needed to find breathing space somewhere alone.

With the blessings of pandemic Ohio winter pricing, I rented a cottage for myself at The Lodge at Geneva-By-The-Lake an hour east of Cleveland for a Friday and Saturday night. The weather that Saturday I can only describe as somewhat magical for winter on Lake Erie. It was clear, with muted sunshine and lines and whisps of cloud. The temperature was in the high 30s, but there was absolutely no wind that day, making it feel warmer than it was. I spent three hours that morning walking in Geneva State Park along the lake, fascinated by the frozen bushes dripping with icicles, and absorbing the winter lake landscape.  

I strolled back to the beach where my Great Lakes mermaid had been swimming five months earlier and sat down. The beach was still sandy but the winter had built up snow banks at the edge of the water – large, undulating mounds of snow crusted with ice.  The lake was filled with floating ice close to the shoreline. As at any time of year by a Great Lake, there was that great, distant, unbroken dark horizon line where water meets an enormous expanse of blue sky.

The most remarkable thing about the beach that morning was the absolute, dead silence. The snow banks blocked any noise from the ice and water. The trees behind the beach had just sparse leaves, and with no wind, there was no rustling or whistling, or whispering. Once in a while I could hear a bird somewhere, calling out, but its exact location was distorted by the enveloping silence.

I was profoundly alone.  

And I was profoundly grateful.

I left the beach that day, and the cottage that weekend, having found the breathing space I needed at that moment and having an intrigue and curiosity about Lake Erie deepen into something else – a relationship that would become an anchor in my life.