For my birthday, we usually take a short trip out of town. Typically it is somewhere within 3 hour driving distance. This year, we chose Erie, and we decided to take the dogs with us.
On Monday morning, off we went. Since it is only a 2 hour drive to Erie, we thought we would go early, and enjoy some of the sites before we checked into our room. Our first destination was Presque Isle.
This peninsula juts out into lake Erie, providing lots of places for swimming, fishing, and generally enjoying nature.
Most people visit in the summer, when the activities are more plentiful (and I suspect we will be making a return trip in the summer). Unfortunately, the weather was not as cooperative as I would have liked, but I still managed to get some amazing pictures.
If you are a bird watcher or lover, Presque Isle is a great place to go.
Just walking along, we saw tons of different birds. My goal was to take an awesome picture of a gull, but it was a lot harder than it looked. In the end, I got a so so picture of one, which was good enough for me, because my fingers were starting to freeze (it was sleeting and snowing).
I can only imagine how nice it is to photograph the birds in late Spring/ early Summer.
Presque Isle is home to 2 lighthouses as well. I have always liked lighthouses, so it was fun to go visit these ones. The first one we visited, we walked all the way out to the end of the pier to see it up close.
By the time we got to the second one, it was snowing pretty good, so we looked at it from afar (i.e. inside the car).
We saw some amazing houseboats as well. It made me want to buy one immediately, and spend my entire summer on the lake.
Finally, we kept up our tradition of out of town geocaching by finding a geocache at Presque Isle. As always, we were excited to find the cache, and perhaps will do more caching in the Erie area in the future.
We wanted to spend a little time on the beach, and let the doggies run a bit, but it was so cold and nasty out, we had to skip it.
The beaches are very pretty however, and hopefully we will get to experience them sometime soon.
All in all, we spent about 3 hours on Presque Isle. Trust me, on a nice day, I could have spent 3 times as long there, but with it being cold, snowy, windy and rainy, 3 hours was good enough.
If you are interested, you can see all my photos from the first day of our trip here.