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.