Interlochen State Park: First Camping Trip of 2025!

This past weekend @mrsbozz and I made the trip up to northern Michigan to check out a state park that she had never been to before and I hadn't visited since I was a much younger version of myself. I actually couldn't remember too much about the park except the fact that my dad had a 12 foot aluminum boat at the time and I remember taking it out on the lake with him.

I was fully aware that the park has probably changed drastically in the past 40+ years that I had been there, but I thought we would give it a try anyway. Camping in May in Michigan can be a bit of a crap shoot. You either get lucky and the weather is beautiful, or you get not so lucky and you end up with the rainy windy mess that we experienced.

While lakeside sites at any campground are usually the most desireable, in the Spring and Fall, they can be a bit questionable if the wind is bad or the temperature is low. We actually got both of those things, but it still didn't keep us from having a pretty nice evening when we pulled in on Friday night.

Don't let the photo fool you, it was pretty windy when we pulled into the park and got set up on our site. The wind was coming from the West and then across the campground and out over the lake. There is actually a lake on the other side of the road to the west, so that does little to stop the breeze coming off Lake Michigan which is even further to the west.

I set up the Blackstone griddle behind the trailer to kind of block the wind a little bit and cooked up some chicken fajitas for us to have for dinner that night. They were quite delicious if I do say so myself!

Of course, after dinner, a fire and some cocktails were pretty much mandatory. It was a pretty amazing view and a great night around the fire. @mrsbozz and I were sitting there around the fire minding our own business when suddenly a park ranger drove by and let us know that the area was under a severe thunderstorm warning and that we might want to button up our camp.

We hesitantly did, and then retreated to the trailer just in time before the storms rolled through.

We got some pretty intense storms with quite a bit of lightning. Right across the path from our site was the bath house which doubled as a storm shelter, luckily we didn't have to run over there.

I just wanted to throw this photo in there to show how I was using the trailer stabilizers that I built. The jury is still out on whether they work. I need to trim them down a bit and then we are going to try them on the back half of the trailer next trip.

After the excitement of the storms, we slept in until 8 AM which is quite late for us and then decided to go on a walk. I took some shots of different things we saw on our walk around the campground. We ended up walking through both sections of the campground which gave us a grand total of about two miles. As you can see from the photo above, the beach was looking a little rough.

Actually, so was the swing set that they had on the playground. Can you see how bent and scary that thing is. It's basically screaming lawsuit! I'm actually surprised they still have it up and haven't torn it down. The one thing I didn't see was one of the old arm breaking metal slides that all these parks used to have back in the day.

In the past on mornings like this we would have had our dog Jovi with us on our walk. Since she is no longer with us, it was a bit bittersweet seeing the signs about keeping your dogs on a leash. I'm sure @gooddream will appreciate me sharing it though!

Interlochen State Park is actually a pretty big campground. If you just look at the numbers it is probably somewhere close to 500 sites. Actually 490 when I did a quick Google search. Despite that fact, it was pretty empty on our walk. I thought the "swimmer's itch" sign was funny, so I wanted to share it with you. If you have never experience swimmer's itch, consider yourself lucky. It's almost like a right of passage growing up in Michigan. Many of the inland lakes are plagued with it and if you don't wash thoroughly after swimming, you will find yourself quite miserable!

The good news is, the showers at Interlochen are actually quite nice. In fact, some of the nicest of any state park I have visited in recent history. They were clean and bright unlike many of them at other state parks. Thanks to storms moving through, the outside temperatures had dropped about 26 degrees overnight. That meant the showers weren't too miserable. Trust me, in the middle of the summer, these poorly ventilated spaces become virtual saunas. I can only imagine someplace tropical can match the humidity of a state park shower in the middle of summer!

If I had to guess, the campground was maybe at 20% of its capacity when we visited. I have little doubt in the summer it is always packed full.

Due in large part to the fact that right across the street is the Interlochen Center For The Arts. This organization puts on all kinds of concerts and shows throughout the summer. In fact, as soon as we pulled into the campground, the Facebook geolocation algorithm started doing its thing and I was inundated with ads about the acts who were going to be playing at the amphitheater this summer.

I could totally see @mrsbozz and I camping here one year and walking across the street to watch a show on a warm summer night and then retreating back to our campsite for the evening.

In addition to the concerts they hold there, the arts center also holds camps, courses, and other immersive experiences for young artists and aspiring artists. Pretty much no medium is left out either. Painting, photography, sculpture, music, theater, you name it, they probably touch on it at Interlochen.

Check back tomorrow when I share some of the things we did after our walk on Saturday!

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