Capturing Life One Click at a Time

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Capturing life one click at a time pretty much describes my style of photography. I have a photojournalistic type of photography always striving to keep your images creative and fun. I hope you enjoy the images below and don't forget to leave me a little comment to let me know! :-) Contact me today for more information: Email: abrooksphotography@yahoo.com Phone: 616-308-8918 Scroll down for pricing.

Monday, June 6, 2011

The North Country

Memorial Day weekend, Keith and I took the little ones to the UP for a little family vacation. Living in Michigan my whole life and I have never been to the UP to just explore ... Well, I have been over the bride when I was young but that's about it. It was an amazing vacation. Perfect really! I absolutely adore going places that I can just explore and see what I can see.

After our drive over the big bridge, we stopped to look around. Of course there is the amazement of the bridge itself. Keith, Noah and Alyssa decided to climb down a small hill and go to the sandy beach and explore. I choose to go the less traveled route ... I found baby geese!!

The next day we began our adventure to the Oswald Bear Ranch! We didn't know upon leaving the hotel what an adventure it really would be. You see, up in the north country there are not many main roads. There was one, 123 ... and it was closed. We asked a local for other directions (Since GPS had absolutely no signal up there). Turn around, take a left on County Road 500, another left on County Road 414 and that takes you right to 407. Easy enough, right? Well ... this is a view of County Road ...

A complete 30ish miles of dirt road. We debated renting a small car to save on gas money for our trip, thankfully we decided to stick with the durango ... I got to use 4 Wheel Drive! It was one of my high-lights! I was cruzing down that dirt road. Then I realized, I have no signal on my cell, houses are miles apart and we are in the middle of no where ... um ... maybe I shouldn't be going 50mph down a dirt road, even though it was way fun with the 4 wheel drive.


Well out exploring a bit on county road, the kids found these little puffer thingys. You squeeze them and smoke comes out, they were very impressed ... it was like magic..:-) Then Keith grabbed my camera saying he was sick of never having pictures of me because I am always behind the camera...There is a reason for that! I hate my picture taken but I tried to be a good sport...:-)

After getting to the ranch, which is fairly fabulous by the way, we got to play with 16 week old baby black bears! They were adorable! Funny thing is, the Great Pyrenees puppies are BIGGER at 12 weeks old than a black bear is at 16 weeks old! The year and a half old bears are about the same size as Baloo at a year and a half! I guess my dog IS a big dog.

One of the bears at the ranch just hanging out!

If you are ever up in the UP, I highly recommend checking out Oswald Bear Ranch! It is an awesome place! It is nothing like our local zoos where the bears have a little 20x20 enclosure to walk around in, at Oswalds they literally just wrap some fencing around spots in the woods and put their resuced bears there so they are in their natural environment. And you read that right, the majority of the bears at Oswalds are resused bears! Not only is the Ranch itself amazing, the people there are fabulous!
More vacation pictures to come soon ... I'm very excited to share our adventure at The DeYoung Family Zoo as well!!

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