Tales from the BOOK TOUR...part 6

Memorial Day weekend took me to the lakeshore in SW Michigan for three stops on my book tour. The first was at Buffalo Books in New Buffalo. This store is a combination bookstore and art gallery featuring 22 local artists. The art work is fantastic and ranges from oil paintings, to pastels, to stained glass windows and drawings. There is a lot of talent along the lakeshore!

My next two events were just up the shoreline a bit in South Haven. I gave a presentation with photos at the Senior Center there to a great group of about 30 people. They had great questions for me, too! Afterward, a few of the seniors joined me for a stroll down to the lighthouse and then back to Black River Books.

The next day, I had an author event at Black River Books. It was a combination signing/reading/conversation that stretched over three hours. There was a small circle of chairs in the store and as people filtered in and out, the circle would fill up for a time, then empty out again for the next group. It seems like everyone has questions about my Lake Trek, and I am always happy to answer them.

Black River Books is owned by Dick and Pam Haferman and they often bring their Labradoodles (Booker and Dewey) into the store. The store is mostly used books that the Hafermans acquire from estate sales and other book-sleuthing techniques. I never leave there empty handed!

Here's a short video from my book tour travels, and I hope to see you along the way!

To the LAKE!!

I took my book out to see the LAKE this week!

I'd been away from Lake Michigan for too long. Several trips were scuttled by heavy snows or thwarted by other happenings.

It was so good to see the lake, to view the shelf ice reaching out from the shore, to see where the waves have stacked up broken chunks of ice to form these temporary hillocks and mounds on the surface of the lake.






I climbed one of these formations just to give some scale in the photo. While standing there, I noticed a large crack near my foot that was slowly opening and closing as the water pulsed beneath the layers of ice.

Yikes!





























The lake has many moods and I am drawn to the frozen, quiet force of it in the winter.
These photos are of the Black River heading out to the lake, its surface covered with pancake ice.














Speaking of Black River, I'll be at South Haven's BLACK RIVER BOOKS on Saturday, May 28 from 1-4 signing books.










And I'll be at Buffalo Books in New Buffalo the Thursday before (May 26th) to do a reading/signing. Hope to see you along the way! Check the sidebar here for my developing Book Tour.

The book will be available everywhere
March 1 !!!
(Ask for it at your local indie bookstore.)

Support your local INDIE bookstore!

On the way back from Milwaukee last month, I stopped in at a couple of bookstores on the drive home. Sometimes, a bookstore owner will recognize me and call out, "Hey, you're the Lake Walker Woman!" (or something to that effect). And they want to know when the book is coming out.

I'm thrilled to have a release date of March 1, 2011. Look for my book on their shelves then. There are links to all the bookstores I have visited in the sidebar of this blog. Check them out, or find the indie bookstore nearest to you by going to INDIEBOUND.ORG





















I also stopped in to see the lake at New Buffalo, Michigan. It was a pretty dramatic evening at the beach! New Buffalo has a new independent bookstore right on the Red Arrow Highway. It's called BUFFALO BOOKS and is inside the Harbor County Trading Company. I'll be doing a signing there next summer, so watch for updates on my Facebook Fan Page ('Like' it in the upper sidebar here to get info on your news feed on Facebook).

Revisiting the Lake Trek: Segment 2

Here is the second video of Segment 2 of the Lake Trek, New Buffalo, Michigan to South Haven.

I walked this segment with my son, Ben, from March 24-26.

Note: You may want to press the 'play' button, then pause it and let it completely load before resuming play. This will allow it to play smoothly.

You can find all videos from the Lake Trek on YouTube at: www.YouTube.com/lniewenhuis
Sign up to be a subscriber on YouTube and you'll get an e-mail when I upload a new video.

Walk with me:

Revisiting the Lake Trek

I've been going through the thousands (yes, thousands) of photos I took while on my 1,000 Mile Walk on the Beach. And I'm beginning to assemble them into videos so that you can experience the Lake Trek with me.

I'm hard at work on the book about my adventure, doing research, rewriting, more research, looking over my copious notes, rewriting. I promise it will be a fun read and that you'll learn things you never knew about Lake Michigan (just as I did while walking around it).

'My Lake' is how I've come to think about the lake. I feel more protective of it, more connected to it, like I've recorded it in my body by spending this year walking entirely around it. 'Our Lake' is how we should all feel about Lake Michigan.

Here is the first video. It is of Segment 1 of the Lake Trek, Chicago to New Buffalo, Michigan. I walked this segment alone from March 16-20. It is the most heavily industrialized part of the lake, so there were long stretches where I was forced inland to get around steel mills, container ports, and other industry. I've included shots along the lakeshore here.

Note: You may want to press the 'play' button, then pause it and let it completely load before resuming play. This will allow it to play smoothly.

Walk with me:

Segment 1, Day 5 Michigan City, IN>Union Pier, MI 17 miles

High of 41 degrees.

Janet Smith, owner of the Feallock House Bed & Breakfast in the historic section of Michigan City not only makes a fabulous upside down pineapple french toast, she also invited community leaders to meet me over breakfast. In the group shot are Pat and Roger Potratz (he's the President of the Main Street Association), then Naomi and Neil Kienitz (he's a wonderful local artist and she works as a medical




transcriptionist), then Janet Smith is on the right (and again in
the shot with her cinnamon bread).

While I was having breakfast with these wonderful people, Janet was on the phone to the Mayor's office and then to the local paper. The Mayor had a meeting that morning, so she called Richard Murphy, a City Councilman. He and Deborah Sederberg, reporter from the News-Dispatch, met us at the beach to send me off on the last day of this segment of the Lake Trek.

Heaven help us if Janet Smith ever decides to use her powers for evil instead of good! Michigan City should be proud to have her and her wonderful B&B (where I got the best night's sleep of the trek so far) in their town.

The beach between Michigan City to New Buffalo is gorgeous. Part of
the reason it is so pristine is that Mary (in photo with black bag) always takes a trash bag along with her when she walks the stretch of beach by her home there. She loves the lake, too, and we talked about the Lake Trek a bit. She asked me if I ever got lonely on the trek and I said, "No, I have the lake." She smiled and nodded.

I met some wonderful people along the way and look forward to many more experiences along the Lake Trek. The next segment is next week, from Union Pier to South Haven and I'll walk it with my son, Ben.

Forever Open, Clear, and Free

One week from today, I'll begin the Lake Trek. This first segment stretches 70 miles from Chicago, Illinois to New Buffalo, Michigan. This is the most diverse segment of the trek, traversing three states with portions ranging from the extremes of a major metropolitan city (Chicago), to major tracts of industry (including the defunct U.S. Steel's South Works facility and the recently expanded Amoco refinery installations), to the miles of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Chicago is my favorite big city. Part of the reason is that it is on Lake Michigan, but it is even more appealing because the city has preserved its relationship with the lake. Twenty-four miles of Chicago's thirty miles of shoreline has been preserved for parks, beaches, museums, and other public spaces. In addition to this, Chicago has recently reclaimed even more land for public use. The grand, art-filled Millennium Park (pictured above) is largely land that used to be a train yard. And this park transitions into Grant Park which stretches to the lake.

Lois Wille wrote a fantastic book about the history of Chicago called Forever Open, Clear, and Free. She chronicles the struggle to preserve the lake front for the people of the city. The fourth section in Blair Kamin's book, Why Architecture Matters, contains his essays on the lake front. He critiques the current situation and calls for a more cohesive plan (and more money) to unify, improve, and protect Chicago's relationship with the lake.

Industry has been part of the lake for a long time. The Amoco facility has been there for over 100 years. The steel plants even longer. We may not like these stretches of industry, but as long as we drive cars made of steel and fuel them with gasoline, we will need them. It is important that the relationship between industry and the lake is is symbiotic and not detrimental to the lake. Tens of millions of people get their drinking water from Lake Michigan, many more enjoy the shoreline or waters every year.

It will be strange to step out of the industry-scape onto the dunes of the over twenty miles of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. This stretch of park was set aside in 1966 and is an area of great biodiversity. Two years ago, I climbed Mount Baldy (over 100 feet high) with my brother, Phil. It may not sound like it's that high, but it's incredibly steep and for every five steps up, you slide back four. When we got to the top, I looked at Phil. He was a very strange shade of intense red and he was gasping. He looked at me and said, "Did you bring me here to DIE?" We laugh about it now. Well, actually, I laughed about it then!

I will try to post to the blog whenever possible along the trek and I'll be taking many notes for my book, A 1,000 Mile Walk on the Beach. Thanks for following this blog, and don't forget to click on the hat in the side bar to sign up for more updates. I'll also give away a hat or t-shirt at the end of each segment to someone who has signed up.