Discover St. Joseph

Getting great fall foliage pictures can be easy, challenging, or impossible. There are two important elements you must have to get those knock-your-socks-off pictures... timing + sunshine. The timing has to be just right. If you're too early in the season, you won't get vibrant colors, too late and you won't get any color. And sunshine is a must. If you try to capture bold bright colors on an overcast day, well, give it up. It just ain't gonna happen. There's just nothing like Mother Nature's spotlight to give vibrancy to fall foliage. If you have the right timing + lots of sunshine you almost can't take a bad picture of autumn's canvas. Just find yourself some pretty trees and click the shutter button. If you have the right timing but the sun is playing hide and seek with the clouds you'll have yourself a bit of a challenge. Have patience, stick with it, and you'll be glad you did. If you have the right timing but it's overcast, or worse yet...

D and I took a drive up to South Haven for dinner last night. It was a pleasant thing to do on a Sunday evening. Most of the trees we saw along the drive were still green but we passed one patch surrounding a pond where all the leaves on the trees were dark red and brown. We'd seen the sign for the Thirsty Perch restaurant on previous visits to South Haven. We made this trip specifically to dine there. The restaurant is on Broadway just north of Phoenix. Their sign is easy to see from the street. The restaurant was almost empty when we got there about 6pm. I was a bit surprised that there weren't more diners on a Sunday evening but then it is past peak tourist season. Anyway, the restaurant was nicely appointed with an upscale urban feel to it. It had comfortable seating, soft but not dim lighting :-), and soothing lake colors. The menu had much to choose from but it's evident they specialize in perch. I happen to love lake perch so this was a plus in my book. I ordered ...

Clementine's Too is definitely one of my favorite restaurants in St. Joseph. It's nice that it's located right along the St. Joseph River, but that's not why I like it. I like it for the casual atmosphere and the terrific food. My favorite dish is called "Red Rooster". It consists of sauteed chicken breasts glazed in strawberries and served with a rice pilaf, steamed broccoli, garlic bread and cole slaw. And each and every bite of it is scrumptious! I've had this dish several times now and it never fails to please. D is fond of the "Drunken Sailors", a half pound of shrimp steamed in beer. Like me, he orders this repeatedly in spite of the large variety of items on the menu. We've had a couple different desserts at Clementine's. The baked apple dumpling is very tasty. But the dessert we had last week was fabulous! Mini cream puffs served with sliced strawberries and drizzled with Ghirardelli chocolate sauce. Oooh, it makes my mouth water...

Although I've lived in Michigan all my life, I haven't spent a lot of time visiting the west side of the state. I'm much more familiar with the beach towns in Ontario on the east coast of Lake Huron than I am with beach towns of Lake Michigan. I've been to Holland once when the kids were small, and I've been to Traverse City. If you count winter trips across the state I've been to Muskegon too. But that's it. So when it comes to evaluating Lake Michigan's beach towns, I don't have a lot of knowledge and experiences to draw on. At this point the town I'm most familiar with is St. Joseph, and I'm not very familiar with it! The suburbs of Detroit each have their own personality and one could certainly say the same for western Michigan's beach towns. St. Joseph, for example, is a slice of small town Americana set on one of the most beautiful beaches Lake Michigan has to offer. One gets the impression that the residents tolerate the influx of ...