The Sunrise Coast: Harrisville, Michigan

After all of our packages arrived to Tawas, we were ready to start our northward trek up the Sunrise Coast to our next stop – Harrisville State Park (our review).

We were surprised to even snag a site over a weekend at a state park, and by looking at pictures online on the Michigan State Park reservation system – it looked like we might have scored a great wooded site too.

Turns out, we were right!  Our site, spot 29, was huge and tucked into a back corner and surrounded by trees. It offered a lot of privacy, and even had direct access to the walking path into town. Perfection.

But our first love with the park started at the dump station.  It’s not often we remark on a dump station.

Michigan state parks are all electric sites with no water or sewer, and so far, we’ve noticed all the parks offer very convenient dump stations with fresh water fills. We’ve made a habit of dumping our tanks upon arrival, and filling up the water before settling into our site.

At this park however, they have courtesy dump hoses!  At first, you just want to go ‘ewwwwwww.. who’s used this before?’

But it didn’t take long to come around to just how darn convenient this is, and who really cares about who used it before – poop is poop, and it’s going out your tanks, not in. (And you wear gloves anyway, right?)

Instead of fiddling with getting our hoses out, and then putting them away wet – we just hook theirs up and release.  So time-saving, especially if you have folks waiting in line behind you.

Unfortunately, when we dumped on the way out – both of the attachment pieces of the hoses hadn’t survived the weekend.  So maybe this system has a major flaw in it after all.

Our love with the park continued, especially once we took our first walk on the sandy beaches.

We had expected that the east coast of Michigan was mostly rocky beaches – and so far, we’ve not found that true. Harrisville has marvelous sandy beaches, and we made a habit of walking this one a couple of times a day at least.  A great diversion.

They even have campsites right on the beach.. absolutely lovely!  We weren’t fortunate enough to score one of those, so we rejoiced in the solitude of the site we did end up with.

The park also has about a mile walking path into the adorable little town of Harrisville, which is just large enough to sport a small IGA grocery store, a couple of cafes, laundromat and 3 hair salons.

Just enough to cover the essentials.

Aside from several walks a day on the trails, beach and into town – mostly we wrote. And wrote. And wrote some more.  We’re super focused on the re-write of ‘The Mobile Internet Handbook‘.  We’re writing & research fiends.

What’s Next?  We’re now in Alpena, MI – where we just rode out the holiday weekend in a lovely place (we’ll update on that soon!). This morning we’ll be heading northward about 40 miles to P F Hoeft State Park, just outside Rogers City – our next top on the Sunrise Coast trail up highway 23.  These long driving days are killer!  We intend to get the first draft of the book done by the end of this week, spend a week doing several editing passes … and then it’s off to our editor. Whew, lots of work ahead of us!