Venetian Festival -- Charlevoix, MI

Saturday – today we’ll make our way to Charlevoix, MI where they are celebrating their Venetian Festival. It was only a 2 hour ride down from Harbor Springs and the seas were less than 1 ft.

Charlevoix is a great place to visit via boat – this will be our 3rd trip via boat. The city is right off of Lake Michigan on a lake named Round Lake. Round Lake is just a small lake surrounded by very nice high end homes with most of the homes having huge boat houses right on the water that they drive their large yachts into. There are also a number of “mushroom homes” that have just amazing craftsmanship.

As we made our way under the draw-bridge (opens on the ½ hour), we could certainly tell that their Venetian Festival was going on. There were hundreds of boats all over the place. We made our way through Round Lake and anchored on the West shore of Lake Charlevoix – which is a large internal lake. There were many many small ski boats, sailboats, jet ski’s, etc all over the place. The good news is that Lake Charlevoix is fairly large and we anchored out of the way, but still got rocked and rolled all day from the boat wake.

As we entered Lake Charlevoix, we noticed that Noble House from Sturgeon Bay was sitting on anchor. Noble House is a 48ft Ocean Alexander that is owned by a gentleman that used to own the marina that we were at (Sturgeon Bay Yacht Harbor). We used to dock our boat next to his and have visited with them many times when we have been at anchor (in fact, we visited with them on our first day out on this trip). Later that day we made our way over and went aboard for a visit – very impressive boat and very nice people. He has been involved in the yacht building/yacht brokerage/marina business pretty much his whole life (he is in his late 70’s) and has many stories to tell.

We made our way into the dinghy dock in Charlevoix and enjoyed sitting in the park listening to some great music. In the evening (right after dark) they had probably 20 boats that they put lights all over and paraded them around Round Lake and then ended the evening with a huge fireworks show in the middle of Round Lake.

The kids enjoyed some swimming and we enjoyed a nice run through the very classic homes in the area.

Internet Update: Verizon Aircard and Cell phone service without the need for the booster/antenna.