From staff reports Glen Arbor is hot. Glen Arbor is busy. You need to eat. You need to swim. You need to find a bathroom. But a line of fellow tourists snakes out the door of Art’s Tavern and down Lake Street. And no one seems to have answers for your most dire questions. That’s […]
This is the first in a series of articles prompted by the centennial celebration of the founding of the National Park Service. Throughout 2015, the Glen Arbor Sun will publish a range of stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and people’s relationships with their local park.
In advance of Glen Lake Restaurant Week, May 1-9, we reached out to Blu chef Randy Chamberlain to ask what excites him about this culinary opportunity before the local tourism season kicks into gear.
Since the mid-winter freeze is here, and since Empire and Glen Arbor’s “Winterfest” celebrations return this weekend, we decided to chat with Wayne “Soni” Aylsworth, whose all-season apparel outfitter, Empire Outdoors, is wrapping up its first year in business.
I wanted to have African-American relatives long before I learned that, through marriage, I did. It just made sense to me that with the Stocking family in America for almost 400 years that sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had married people who were black.
I’ve fielded the “Whaddaya do up there all winter?” question. A lot. I’m a seasonal employee at a retail establishment in Glen Arbor. My place of employment is visited during the summer and fall months by out-of-towners, many of whom express a reasonable curiosity about life UpNorth after summer’s omnipresent sunny-ness fades. One such inquisitor was completely sold on Glen Arbor in the summer. But the winter? Not so much, she said.
A “Bay to Bay” hiking, paddling and camping trail proposed for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore has generated excitement among local business owners and recreation enthusiasts but also attracted significant opposition from private property landowners who live near the trail’s potential route. Staff at the National Lakeshore have subsequently slowed planning for the Bay to Bay Trail initiative. They extended the public comment period by an extra month this fall, and have drawn out the project’s scoping phase until next summer.
Author Anne-Marie Oomen offers the third in three lessons about how to write about your summer vacation in Leelanau. Use sensory language to describe your best summer moments; use strong, action verbs to keep memories locked in place. Now she explores the “so what” factor.
Taking a stroll down Western Avenue in the village of Glen Arbor, you’ll come to a lawn that is beautifully landscaped in Michigan native plants. This is 6391 Western Avenue, the headquarters of Sleeping Bear Birding Trail (SBBT). What, you wonder, is a birding trail? That’s the most frequently asked question by both tourists and locals coming through the door, said operations director Mick Seymour. “What the heck is a birding trail?”
Our default perspective is from our own place and time. This is natural. It cannot be otherwise. Yet it’s sometimes fun to engineer a shift in the way we see and experience things, and by so doing create more awareness. You can put on the 3-D glasses for another time period by trying out earlier modes of transportation. Some of these are a little hard to find but walking, our original mode of locomotion, is always available. Travel by canoe, ox-cart, stage coach, sleigh, schooner, steamer and train will take a little more effort in the way of arrangement-making, but all are still possible.