Camping and playing at Warren Dunes State Park

This week I spent a few days working down at our plant in St. Louis. I got home Thursday and just wanted to do something fun as a family. I talked Cindy into going camping (it was a pretty easy sell) and started looking for state parks were you could camp and swim. I found a couple but they were closed due to some recent storms that caused power outages. I found a handful that were around 2 ½ hours away, so we finally decided since we’d never camped in Michigan before that we’d head over to Warren Dunes State Park.
We’d called about camping and were informed that they had eight camp sites available that were first come first serve. When we arrived to the park we noticed nearly every sight was open with picnic tables and fire pits so we weren’t in a hurry to claim a spot but rather decided to go play on the sand dunes for a while.


Around 9:30 p.m. I found a pizza hut using the “places” app on my phone, called, and ordered a pizza. Assuming that I’d called the nearest one we pulled into pizza hut only to be informed that they didn’t have my order and that there were three pizza huts in the area. I called back to the number that I’d previously called to place my order and found out that I’d called a location in Wisconsin :) oops. We did, however, get a pizza ordered and ten minutes later we were on our way back to the park. When we got to the park we noticed the sign for the campsites pointing us down a road that we hadn’t previously noticed. We drove down to the office only to be informed that all the campsites were full :(. We drove down to a picnic table and ate our pizza and began calling hotels and other campsites.
After driving nearly 20 minutes to the closest Holiday Inn with an available room we found a campsite with an available spot so we turned around and drove another half hour to the campsite.


When it was all said and done we had a blast. Warren Dunes State Park is a beautiful spot with a bunch of large sand dunes and it sits right on Lake Michigan. We climbed the dunes and played in the lake for hours.