Seen from the lake a few years ago when I actually took a camera out in the water
If you follow me on Twitter, you may know that I have had a sweet piece of Up North Michigan property on the market for nearly three years. I was corresponding with USA Today about being included in an article Stephanie Armour was writing about the fall off in vacation home sales. Big surprise that no one is buying vacation spots right now, isn’t it! (See her article: Sales of vacation homes fall during recession) I got knocked out of the running by a Costa Rica place, which I would trade for in a second! I bet they don’t wait until MOTHER’S DAY for all the snow to melt!
A fellow Twitterer and Zazzler who also lives in Michigan, Sandy from Samack, saw my Tweet about the feature possibility and remarked that she’d like to see what my Up North property looks like. So, here are the photos I sent to the USA Today photo editor!
I take a lot of my photographs here. It’s on all-sports Black Lake, about 45 minutes south of The Bridge (as we say locally). I’ve photographed Bunchberry, Jack in the Pulpit, Lady’s Slipper, Trailing Arbutus, Anemones, Wild Strawberries, Indian Pipe, Black eyed Susans, Turtlehead, Queen Anne’s Lace, Daisies, Milkweed, Hawkweed, Bindweed and more here. Deer, coyotes, ducks, porcupines, foxes and beavers have been known to show up along with the birds and butterflies. I’ve got a garden going with some apple trees and lots of lavender, oregano, thyme and chives.
But the economy has not been on my side!
Below is my note to Stephanie which prompted our correspondence. I’ve put the story and photos on their own page. Go to Up North Heaven for Sale!
Hi Stephanie,
I have lakefront vacation property in northern Michigan that has been on the market since July, 2006. It’s a sweet piece of property, over 5 acres with 300 feet of good swimming frontage and no close neighbors, backing up to hundreds of acres of state forest land. It has an artesian spring that runs year round and is ready for the building of a permanent structure with a flat cleared space. It ranges from fragrant cedar swamp at the lake’s edge to birch and spruce and maple then oak, poplar and white pines on a bluff at the back of the property.
This is a good sized lake (10,000A) and has always been the kind where people kept the property in their family and you didn’t see many “for sale” signs in the past. My own family has been there since the 1940s. It’s an all-sports lake, but not one where a lot of money ever migrated. You might think of it as more of a blue collar type crowd, with a number of property owners having worked in automotive and many from Ohio. In fact, the UAW Conference Center is on this lake.
When I bought this place in 2003, I had searched for over two years for something nice and available. Most of what sells in the area now are foreclosures.
Is this the sort of story you’re looking for?
