It is almost always beautiful in Bay View, but the sunsets are extraordinary.  My son, Sam, has an entire photo album on his facebook page devoted entirely to Bay View Sunsets.  Around here, sunsets are an event.  There are benches strategically placed throughout Bay View that invite you to just sit and savor the beauty.  So it is not unusual to find people gathered on the banks of the Bay – sitting on benches or swings, or just standing there – waiting for sunset.  And when it comes, after the very last sliver of blood-red orange slips beneath the horizon, they clap.

You would too…

In the summer of 1997, my sister and her family came to Bay View to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.  We rented a large cottage across the street from Rob’s family, and all of us piled into it for a week of Bay View splendor.  There was pie at “Jesperson’s” in Petoskey, and sunsets over Lake Michigan, a trip to Mackinac Island to see The Grand Hotel and the horse-drawn carriages in that picturesque little place that still doesn’t allow cars, and there was the periodic excitement of running to the corner stoplight to watch the ambulances go by.  About halfway through their visit, my sister asked – politely, but with sincerity – “what do you actually do up here?”

There’s a lot about Bay View that’s hard to explain.  That’s one of the reasons I haven’t been able to offer up as many posts over these last two weeks as I had expected.  What do we do up here?  It’s a little hard to explain, but it looks something like this.