In these last 2 days of Pandemic April 2020 we’d like to share with you something that you can do on the weekends or in your free time since many of us are going a bit crazy at home AND some may have additional extreme high stress due to being “Non-Essential” businesses during the Stay at Home (dangerous financial situation) OR be “essential” as a healthcare or food worker (dangerous physical position). Though camping itself is NOT ALLOWED during this time in most states (as Michigan’s DNR said today that may last until at least 2 months from now in late June or later), we have enjoyed going to parks and beaches here in the Midwest in the past week when stress was at an all-time high. Our dogs really enjoyed the parks that we went to (us only choosing ones with few to no cars in the parking lot for safety since MOST/ almost no folks are wearing masks) & our cat Kevin has gone along on different nature trips over the past 4+ years as well. Since as of Friday April 24th it’s allowed in Michigan, our 8 month old puppy even got to ride alone with us in a family motorboat in Michigan (with JUST us after we wiped the entire thing down with our sanitizer & Mr. Clean Magic Erasers)!
Getting out in nature in the mornings, lunches, evenings (sunset here being 8:30 p.m.), or on weekends/ “off” days can really help mental health. Not only can you breathe in clean, fresh nature air not found inside your home or work place, but we firmly believe in it as a serene stress relief as a whole when getting to hear wind rustle through leaves & grasses, watch spring flowers pop up through the ground, and sit and watch ripples or waves out on the water. It IS & has been FULLY legal to go to the state parks & beaches in Indiana & Michigan right now during the pandemic, so we fully recommend heading there as a calming, enjoyable activity! Below we’ll be sharing some nature spots that we’ve visited (mostly with our pets here in the Midwest (Michigan & Indiana focused) in the past 1 & a half years :)
We found this state park about a year & a half ago. It’s about a 5 hour round-trip for us, so we opted to stay there with our dog & cat on our first trip up there, then again on Jenny’s birthday again 8 months ago again with our dog & cat. These images are from that trip up, but sadly don’t include photos of our cat outside because the last time he went out by the water he hated it. (You’ll see in more photos below).
We made a handful of side trips during this visit. We visited some sand dunes we’d never been to….
….and we also made another side trip up to see a lighthouse we’d never seen before! That was the furthest north in Michigan either of us has ever been, but it’s a goal of ours to someday within the next year or 2 go up to northern Michigan & the Upper Peninsula.
We also stumbled upon a cool log building in one of the parks that we went to, so that was an unexpected find as well!
The first time we had ever gone to that particular park on the mid-Michigan west coast (Lake Michigan) had been 10 months earlier around Halloween the year before. That time brought our cat Kevin to the beach too-! He ended up puking in the beach grasses because of the bumpiness in carrying him down the dunes AND got beach fleas afterward, so this was of course his only time down there on the beach (as we learned that he clearly doesn’t enjoy it- as a 3rd negative he almost had a panic attack even SEEING water that vast).
(As you can see, though cute, Kevin was NOT thrilled).
In the past week we also enjoyed a park we’d never been to prior in Indiana, so here are a few photos of us from there! This time our puppy Rizzo got to join in! We’ve had her for 6 months, she’s 8 months old, she’s a rescue maybe Border Collie/ beagle mix, she was born next to a women’s prison in rural Kentucky 8 hours away, we got her from a local rescue, & they named she and her ALL FEMALE litter of siblings after the female cast of the movie Grease. Anywho, we all thought that this park was pretty cool:
Another place we’ve been fortunate enough to get to visit for a quick second in the past week was another beach up in mid-Michigan! We were on our way back from picking up a workout bike from a seller’s porch (gloves were used) and stopped by a couple State Park beaches that we’d never been to to kind of scope them out for future adventures. One state park’s parking lot was extremely full, so we passed on that/ decided we’d go a different day, then we moved on to a completely empty parking lot in a city about a half hour south as we were driving home! We didn’t have our dogs with us this time as we had to put the exercise bike in the back of the car/ lay down the seats, BUT we had a great time getting to see a beach we’d never been to (while killing 2 birds with one stone- also getting to scout out a beach in the city that one of our couples who pre-paid months ago for a Spring May Engagement Session wants to have their Session at-! They love it up there, so we agreed to this beach city for their location months ago and are patiently waiting until we’re allowed to photograph them up in that city). It had been drizzly out until that point in the day, so other than 1 couple who had ridden over on bikes and left out down the beach in the opposite direction, we were completely alone. It was serene after a not-so-serene week of 4.5 months’ worth of weddings being re-scheduled & more pandemic government paperwork & disappointments.
We hope that these views and ideas for getting out in nature helped calm you a bit and helped get the creative juices flowing for places in nature that you can safely visit to walk/ hike on quick day trips! Our clients have BY FAR been one of the most stabilizing force in the past week & a half for us as we all struggled through the pains of rescheduling all of the weddings up until August 1st. They ALL opted to still pay in full on their contract dates nearly bringing us to tears when we had lost all hope. We saw this year’s late fall dates fill up even more as 2021 also begins to fill up and we’re now optimistic for the first time in A FULL MONTH & A HALF.
We in the past week also JUST saw just a little money come in from the government via the personal stimulus checks everyone got WEEKS ago (well, one of them coming in a few days apparently) & a little bit on top of that in the form of a small business grant (barely more than the stimulus check). Even these that add up to less than ONE wedding with us, it still feels like a small victory after such an awful/ high stress month & a half, but again… the TRUE heroes of our newfound relief are our couples/ clients. With new plans & dates in place after the limbo of the unknown for 6 weeks (intensely for ALL of us together) we finally feel like all of us can tackle whatever is thrown at us & are hoping for the best. Though we may not be able to do our job of Professional Wedding Photography for 4.5 months in total (OR more), we finally don’t feel the incessant overwhelming anxiety that we’d been feeling for a month & a half. We hope to get outside more (socially distanced with masks in pocket just in case) as the weather gets better and better & we still plan to bring you an appropriate Weekly Wednesday EVERY week whether you like it or not! Jokes aside, we hope that your anxieties can be helped in a REAL way as well. At the very least we hope that you can seek out some serenity from nature or elsewhere in order to help (even for an instant) calm the inner turmoil. Catch you next week.