Kelley’s Island is an island near Sandusky, OH on Lake Erie. I have never been to Kelley’s Island but have been to Put-In-Bay. Paula decided to have a group of people go to the island to celebrate September birthdays in our group of friends. Steve, Paula, Tony, and my birthdays were all in September.

People: Andy, Paula, Colin, Katie, Eric, Tony, Vivake, Kelsen, Steve, Christie, and me.

We decided to start by leaving around 10:30 and drive to Marblehead, OH to catch the ferry. The ferry was $19 for a round trip pass. We paid and then waited a few minutes to board the ferry. One car load did not make the first ferry, and the ferries were only running every hour due to the weather. It actually stopped raining by the time we got to Marblehead, which made us feel a little better about going since the weather was supposed to be high of 50 degrees and rainy. The ferry ride was a little rough. Fortunately, none of us got too sick. The cars on the ferry were rocking all over the place.

The island ended up being bigger than I thought it was. Fortunately, one of my coworkers owns a condo on the island, so he gave me a map to take with us. This helped.

We got to the island and headed to Kelley’s Island Wine Company. Colin and Andy wanted to try to ride bikes, so they went to the rentals while the rest of us walked to the Wine Company. They came to the winery without bikes because no one was working the stand. The others all met us at the winery. We all ordered pizza and wine for lunch. The pizza was really good, but the menu options did not have a large variety.

After the Wine Company, we decided to take a walk to the Glacier Grooves. The Grooves were created by the Wisconsin Glacier. The walk was nice, and we got to see the state park and where the campground was. After doing a quick walk around the Grooves, we headed to the Brewery.

The walk to the Brewery went through town, where we got to see some of the restaurants and the attractions that would be popular in the summer months. There were bike rental shops and golf cart rentals. We tripled the number of customers once we got to the bar. They were having Oktoberfest without any Oktoberfest beers, which was strange. However, their beers were actually quite tasty.

We decided to leave there around 6:45 to walk back to the ferry to catch the7:30 ferry home. We all got to see a beautiful pink and orange sunset on the lake on our walk back to the ferry from the brewery. It lit up the bottom of the clouds beautifully. I didn’t take my camera with me because of the weather forecast, so I missed out on a beautiful sunset picture.

We took the ferry back to Marblehead and rode at the top exposed part. It started to get cold, so Andy and I went down to the lower level. There were only three cars on the ferry back. The water did get choppy at the end of the ride, but they were not bad like the way out.


View Kelly’s Island in a larger map

We walked roughly 6.6 miles on Kelley’s Island.

We got back to Cleveland around 9 pm. We all were exhausted and headed home after the drive.