Just about everything anyone loves about beaches can be found in the upper Great Lakes: smooth soft sand, vast horizons, clear blue water, tiny strange sand bugs, gull footprints, the bubbling sand after a wave recedes. One thing not usually idolized however is the freezing-cold water of the lakes. It can make swimming something you have to "get over with" in order to lay out on the beach. For many locals however, the icy temperatures they grew up with translate to cleanliness. It means they get turned off by warmer southern waters since it feels "dirty". I think it's just a way to identify themselves with the land they're from...
There are so many reasons to love winter in the northern hemisphere. One of them is that there are so many cloudy days which push our minds inward so we can reflect on the past and digest it a little further ...like a cow bringing up cud from one of its stomachs in order to chew and extract more nutritional value out of a meal from the recent past. 
Sometimes I bother myself by looking at the past year from too narrow a focus and let myself get disappointed that I'm not studying Arabic in Damascus right now or something like that. Instead, I look back and see that I started the year in Budapest, and landed up back in New York where I've been for so long...
What is it about water, by itself, that can draw people just to look at it? It's obvious why human geography has largely organized along the coast lines and major water courses of the world, and it's beyond obvious why it's so precious to us as living bodies. But why are we drawn to it as a place to stare off into? Perhaps a more interesting question: when there's a crowd of people staring off at the horizon from an overlook built expressly for the purpose of staring out over an empty sea, what is going on inside each person's mind? 
I've always been curious and befuddled by Michigan, though I've never been able to articulate why. I remain perplexed despite having previously lived there for over eight years.
It's in the middle of a large continent, but it's surrounded by huge inland seas. It's culturally conservatively midwestern, yet also very coastal. Perhaps some of the trouble lies in that having grown up in the US, we're conditioned to stereotype coastal culture as liberal, stylish and worldly compared to an insulated, provincial continental interior.
So, life there is steeped in visuals of vast sand beaches, wooden ship steering wheels and lighthouses as home decor, sport boats, fishing vessels, giant ore tankers, gulls, huge sand dunes covered with beach grass and covering ghost forests, and ever-present horizons of open sea. Now add to that a deep-running fondness for cozy pastel sweatshirts and flannel, fleece slippers, an ingrained deer-hunting culture revolving around bait piles, big, square, American-made minivans and trucks, and a decent peppering of conservative religiosity, and you have a unique culture I've only ever seen in Michigan. Occasional whiffs of preppy looks or aspirations remind me of New England, though perhaps only a movie version of New England... Of course stereotypes never hold up upon any kind of examination, but for that matter neither do most people's dearly held self-identity.
On the surface, none of the above geographic or cultural elements should seem to be at odds with another (and likely match quite perfectly in the mind of any given reader); nevertheless, every time I go back I have to adjust my mental map. I can't shake my surprise that there are all those huge seas all around me there.
