The day we took our trip up the coast of Michigan's "thumb", we also made a couple of other stops.

The Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse was one of those stops. The park is a little bit off the main highway, but there are plenty of signs to direct you to the park.

Next to the lighthouse is a campground, so the first thing that my wife and I did was drive through the campground to see if it would be someplace we might want to park our trailer in the future.

The sites in the campground were very nice, but it is right on the water, so the winds were very cool coming of the lake. I think unless you were parked there in the middle of Summer, it might be too cold to enjoy.

You can kind of see the campground in the back ground of this picture of the light keepers house.

The lighthouse is fully automated now, so there is no actual keeper on the grounds. They do have a museum and a gift shop on site though, so there are park personnel around.

I took a lot of pictures around the park site, so I am going to share some of those now.

This is looking out at Lake Huron with the lighthouse behind me. You can see the campground in this shot as well. It had been a cloudy morning, but the winds were helping to push the clouds off to the East. We were lucky that it ended up being nice and sunny while we were here. The temperature was still probably only around 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was the oil house where they kept the oil for the light. Again, you can kind of see the campground in the background.

Michigan has many of these plaques around on their registered historic sites. This one tells the history of the lighthouse.

The next series of pictures may be hard to read, but they are informational stations that were placed around the outside of the lighthouse.

In addition to being a lighthouse, Pointe Aux Barques was also home to a life saving station. There was a small monument to honor the members of that service:

Just past the point of the picture above, there was a kind of hidden path that took you down to the shore. As I said, the wind was pretty strong this day, so the waves against the rocks were pretty cool.

Finally, before we moved on, I had to get a picture of this really cool bike rack. I thought it was pretty funny because it is shaped like a bike and it is made to hold your bicycles.

After we left the lighthouse, we continued North up the coast to the small town of Grindstone City. There isn't much in Grindstone City, but they do have a lot of old grindstones laying around here and there. They also have a nice little ice cream place called the GrindStone General Store:

Be advised, the portions here are huge!

This was the kiddie size and it consisted of two to three large softball sized scoops of ice cream.

They have a selection of flavors that they make themselves in house. The rest of the ice cream they sell is similar to what you can get in the store.

If I had to guess, the kiddie size was probably close to a full pint of ice cream. Most of us were not able to finish what we had gotten. If I ever make my way back, I will probably get the baby size.

I went with their homemade chocolate peanut butter cup flavor and it was very good. My wife and I shared it, but still were not able to eat all of it.

After ice cream we drove the 20 minutes back to our campsite and we had a nice fire at the cabins with our family that night. The next day we headed home and we are now starting to get ready for our next camping trip!