We arrived in Grand Haven to find that they were in the middle of their weeklong Coast Guard Festival. It is a big festival and that day they had a car show along their main street. There were dozens of classic and newer cars along with a decent crowd wandering around looking at the cars. We spent a couple hours wandering around and having lunch at a sandwich place in the main street before heading back to Rover and going to a nearby Mulligan’s Hollow playground. This was a very nice playground but what really drew our attention was the Grand Haven Skate park on the other side of the parking lot. Over half of the kids at the skate park were on push scooters and Olivia had a blast joining in with her new Razor scooter. Olivia spent most of the day scooting around the skate park and enjoying her new scooter.
We started the next day by going to a Starbucks to get some internet and do homeschooling. Even though we have the most expensive “unlimited” T-mobile plan, it only comes with 40 GB hotspot for each of our phones and a few movies on the iPad and some work on the computer sucked all that data before the end of the billing cycle. Olivia had so much fun that after she finished her schooling we returned to the skate park again.
We eventually went to the playground and we found that they were having a free Children’s Day event the next day as part of the Coast Guard Festival. Well count us in! We stayed at the park until sundown before heading to a nearby Walmart for the night.
The next day we returned to Mulligan’s Hollow early so we could get a good parking space. We are large and wide so we definitely didn’t want to wander around a packed parking lot looking for parking. The Children’s day event was pretty good with a giant cow statue, a free rock climbing wall, a crafting tent sponsored by Lowes, free bottled water and ice cream, various free games and the highlight of the event, free hot air balloon rides sponsored by Remax. It was good we got there early because the line got very long and the hot air balloon could only take three or four people at one time. The balloon was tethered to the ground and only went up about 30 feet but it was still really neat to be able to get into a real hot air balloon. The Children’s Fair event ended at 1:00 but we stayed longer so that Olivia got another chance to go to the skate park. Afterwards we were able to do a dump and water refill at the nearby Grand Haven State park.
