today was to be the day we went to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. I've been told these are the best dunes on this tour. Unfortunately due to the government shut down and this being a National Park that didn't happen. I was going to post some info here on the dunes but even the official government website is down.

So we decided to head up a small 10 mile peninsula to see some wineries.

This short ride was filled with wineries and orchards. We were now in grape, apple and cherry growing country. It was a very pretty, sunny, top down, kind of day. We stopped at a winery and I did a little tasting and headed back down to Traverse City for some lunch.

Lunch was at the Grand Traverse Pie Company. We split a turkey cherry sandwich and each had our own piece of cherry pie. And this was really good cherry pie. I could have easily skipped the sandwich and been very happy with just the pie. A very interesting factoid is that this area of Michigan grows one third of the world's cherries. Yes you read that right, one third of the WORLD'S cherries, I find that completely amazing.

If this was a shopping trip I would have spend the afternoon enjoying the stores in the charming downtown and warehouse districts. But our trunk was full. I did manage to squeeze in a jar of cherry butter and then we decided to continue on our journey. Rain was being forecasted so we decided to drive on to Luddington for the night.

You can download the free Traverse Traveler mobile app for your phone at traversetraveler.com. If we would have been there longer I am sure I would have used this, it looked like it would have been helpful.