Algonac State Park: Ship Watching

PeakD seems to be having issues with images again, so you might need to view this post in Ecency to see them properly. https://ecency.com/@bozz/algonac-state-park-ship-watching

For quite some time, @mrsbozz has been expressing an interest in visiting Algonac State Park. We follow a Facebook group that shares different state parks from throughout the state of Michigan and the photos always look so beautiful from this park. I've always kind of put it off because the idea of heading south to camp somehow just doesn't feel right (in Michigan), but I set that aside and booked the weekend trip.

Honestly, I'm a bit sad I didn't do this sooner. It is a fantastic campground with lots of stuff in the area to do and see. I can definitely see us coming back to this campground in the future, with just a few small changes.

Algonac State Park sits on the shores of the St. Clair River just North of Detroit. Lake Erie feeds into the Saint Clair, which then dumps into Lake Saint Clair. From there, the river continues at the north end of the lake and dumps into Lake Huron. Due to this fact, the route is quite popular for the great lakes freighters that are traveling from one point to another.

Obviously, the big draw for the campground is getting a site close to the river so you can watch the freighters and other boats go by.

As you can see from the photo above, one of the first things you are greeted with you enter the campground is a large solar array that they use to power some parts of the campground. Pretty cool right?

It was a bit of a rough start to our camping trip. As I pointed out last week, we had a big storm roll through on Wednesday night which cut our power at home for about 14 hours. We were supposed to leave to go camping on Thursday afternoon, but we weren't going to be able to if power didn't come back on. Thankfully, power was restored about an hour before we needed to leave, so we quickly got the trailer ready and were on our way.

It was hot when we arrived at Algonac State Park, but we decided to have a fire anyway and watch the big boats go by. Our first night we were even lucky enough to see a Great Lakes Cruise ship sail by.

Unfortunately, that night, around 2 AM another band of pretty bad storms rolled through the area. We knew it was coming, but we decided to risk it anyway. The campground lost power for about two hours, but thankfully, it was restored again at 4 AM. It's hard to say what we would have done had power not been restored. We can do everything we need to in the trailer with the battery and gas, but if it got really hot on Friday, we wouldn't have the A/C to keep things comfortable.

Thankfully, that wasn't an issue, and it actually ended up being a beautiful day on Friday.

It's funny how these big freighters tend to push the water instead of cut through it like you would expect the bow of a boat to do. They are just massive and they seem to lumber up and down the Saint Clair River. There is even a website and phone apps where you can track boats and see the name and statistics of the ships that are passing by which is kind of cool.

Unfortunately, Friday night is when things started to turn a bit for us. I didn't do a very good job of picking our campsite this time, and we ended up right next to a family that for lack of a better word I would call entitled. At one point, the lady came over to ask us if it would be okay if their boat was over the campsite line a little bit and encroached on our campsite. We didn't want to be jerks, so we said sure, that is fine. It was the other side of our trailer anyway, so we wouldn't really be doing much over there.

Eventually, the husband showed up with the boat and after back it into the spot we heard the wife say "no, you need to get it as close to that trailer as possible". Sure enough, by the time he was done, the boat was no more than six inches from the side of our trailer slide out.

Definitely one of those instances where you give someone an inch and they take a mile, the entitlement of some people is beyond belief. I'll save that for another post though.

Saturday morning we got up and after taking a walk, we decided to head into town to get some gas in the truck and check out the area a bit more. The neighbors were planning on spending their day on the boat (we overheard the wife yelling it), but by the time we left, they were still there. In fact, even after we got back, they were still there. Eventually, the finally left with their boat, and @mrsbozz and I started talking about what our plans were.

There was another storm system coming through, and packing up on Sunday morning in the middle of a thunderstorm didn't sound like too much fun to us. In addition to that, we thought it might be good to get packed up and out of there before the people returned with the boat. So we decided to pack up a half day early and head home.

So it wasn't just the neighbors that sent us home early, but sadly, people like this are becoming more and more common wherever you go. That being said, we would definitely return to Algonac State Park again, but we decided there are some other sites that we would prefer to have instead of an inside loop like we were sitting on. We also kicked around the idea of not getting a new camper and maybe buying some land somewhere that gives us a bit more space. We like the idea of moving around to different places though. There are pros and cons on both sides.

Don't get me wrong though, it was an awesome weekend and the brilliant blue water of the St. Clair river was quite breathtaking. I spent a lot of time just relaxing, watching the big ships go by, and getting sunburnt.

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