Michigan

For a few days this past week, Ryan and I enjoyed a little vacation to New Buffalo, Michigan. It was a nice little getaway to celebrate our 5th anniversary. I was sad to leave Layla behind for the second time in two weeks but she had a blast with Papa Pete and Grandma Barb and got to hang with Aunt Joan too. Thank you all so much for watching our little girl for us!!

Our hotel room wasn't ready when we arrived so we wandered to the beach and decided to be adventurous and walk along these rocks pretty far into the water. We felt like we were quite the risk takers until a dad and two very small little girls flew by us....and then another dad and two little girls. Oh well :-)

Here was the view from our hotel room. Lots of boats!! We had fun looking at all of the names of the boats. We found some good ones. Thank you Steph for the great hotel recommendation!! We really loved it there, especially the breakfast being brought to the room part :-)

Speaking of good boat names...we thought this one sounded pretty good!

So the next day we decided to head to the beach again...
Okay, maybe we didn't! The day before we had unsuccessfully tried to go jet-skiing (too expensive as it rivaled the cost of the new kitchen table we have been eyeing) and then kayaking (the oars were suddenly missing after we had paid and were gearing up to go into the water). We were thankful we never made it into the water after seeing this sign the next morning!

We went for a bike ride instead and we oohed and ahhed over the huge houses right on the lake. It inspired us to go try to win money at the local casino that night (they had the best penny slots, the Amazing Race game was so fun!) but we had no luck and we actually ended up spending more money at the arcade than the casino. We love a good arcade and both had sore arms from the basketball game the next day.

The surrounding area of New Buffalo is all wine country so we enjoyed visiting a few of the wineries in the area.

Our favorite was the Tabor Hill winery as it had a delicious little restaurant with tons of goldfinches flitting around outside the window, a winery tour and a complimentary wine tasting. A couple of the wineries also had breweries on site so Ryan got to try a couple of different beers too. The wine tasting pretty much verified that I like white, sweet wine. I am so not a sophisticated wine drinker.

After dinner that night we headed to Oink's, a little ice cream shop. Thank you Amanda for this recommendation! It was an adorable ice cream shop and the ice cream was delicious (and I would venture to say that we know our ice cream much better than wine)!!

The next day we headed to a winery/fruit farm to pick our own fruit. Our neighbor told us we had to get the peaches and so we found a place that offered u-pick during the week days.

I thought their fruit stand set-up was so cute.

Here I am picking peaches.

And Ryan too.

We ended up picking 11 pounds of peaches. It was a dollar a pound so we just picked and picked...but now I have a lot of peaches. My mom got quite a few, but I still have an overabundance. I have been hunting down peach recipes because they are too good to go to waste!

Next we picked raspberries. These were a little tougher because a lot of people had already picked and we were contending with bees.

But they are so good and will definitely not go to waste. Layla has to be cut off of raspberries during most meals :-)

There it is, our New Buffalo trip in a nutshell.

We loved our time away but we are also happy to be home with little Miss Layla.

If you are looking for a new mini or extended vacation spot you have to try New Buffalo...very fun!