I hope you all had a great Christmas…or holiday…or Friday… depending on your beliefs. I spent it driving around looking for photographs.

I had a plan to visit Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore…but a road was closed, probably due to the storm we had on Thursday, so I took a few turns here and there and found plenty of photogenic places on the interior of Leelaneau Peninsula.

The thing about driving around looking for pretty things is that when you see something you have to find someplace safe to park off the road, get your camera, get yourself out of the seat belt, out of the car and over to whatever caught your eye before the light changes.

Yesterday that was hard because the sun was moody; mostly behind big dark clouds, but occasionally popping out, turning the sky blue and shining on something. A barn. A grove of fruit trees. A birch tree. Moss. Sometimes I got the shot, most of the time I didn’t. I’m disappointed that so many beautiful things are not in the camera, but they will always be in my memory!

After several hours, and on my way back to the house, I remembered I still had a mile to walk, in order to keep my streak of walking one mile every day from Thanksgiving to the New Year alive. Sure I may have walked a mile in bits and spurts while getting in and out of the car. But probably not. If I’ve learned anything while doing this ‘walk or run a mile every day’ challenge it’s that one mile is a lot farther than you’d think.

So I stopped at Houdek Dunes Natural Area, a place preserved by the Leelanau Conservancy. It has trails through the woods and the dunes. By then the sun was shining a little more and it lit up some of the largest birch trees I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t even capture the immensity of these trees. You really need to walk through this place yourself.

I think I got enough nature photos just on this one walk to continue Heather’s challenge of posting one nature photo a day for several more weeks. In fact all the photos on this post are from my walk among the trees and sand yesterday.

I guess I’ll have to show you the other beautiful places I found in another post on another day.