Last Day and Final Observations 7-28 & 7-29-2015

We actually had time this morning to get up leisurely and go have breakfast.  We decided to take a ride to the Indiana Grand Race Track and Casino.  It took us about a half hour to get there from the hotel.  This is a huge complex about 20 miles south east of the city of Indianapolis.  I think we were both surprised at the size of this place.  We parked and went inside the casino.  The room was huge and very nice with self serve soft drink machines.  The thing we found so strange was there were more men than woman playing the slots.  Most of the time we were there we had fun and it wasn't overly smoky but it wasn't really busy when we got there either.  We were getting hungry and decided to leave and find a place for lunch.  When we were leaving we saw horses on the track.  We went back in and went to the restaurant in the clubhouse where we watched a couple of the horse races and ordered lunch.  The service was horrible in there although when we finally got our food, it was very good.  Although I didn't bet on any races, just picking out names and the colors they were wearing, I picked two that were in the top 3 in the races we watched.  I guess that is as good a way to pick a horse as any.  When we left there, Betty our GPS, told us to turn the opposite way we thought we should go.  We kept making turns and had no idea where we were.  Finally we pulled up to the intersection where we got off the expressway but on the opposite side of the expressway.  Debbie and I kept staring at each other and finally said "how is it possible we got on this side of the expressway when we never cross over or under it at any point?"  We are still baffled as to how that happened...it just seemed to be an impossibility.  Heading home we got caught in a terrible storm and downpour where we couldn't see 10 feet in front of the car.  Luckily we drove out of it a few miles later.  We spent the balance of the night packing and repacking for me to fit everything in I bought.  We can't believe that the trip is over already.  Since Debbie is having "horse babies" this year we probably won't see any more of each other until next summer so we hated to see this trip come to an end.  We slept well and loaded the car, then we had breakfast and got the last of the things from our room.  Debbie dropped me off at the airport then started her six plus hour drive home.  She was going to make a side trip to Terre Haute and visit the Grand Traverse Pie Company.  This was the place we visited that had the great pie.  She wanted to get one to take home.  My flight back to Atlanta was uneventful and I was home by late afternoon.

 

 

 



Final thoughts.....

We didn't choose these states because there were things we wanted to see or do but because they were the three states I had not visited.  We tried to find things in all the places that we went to do to make it interesting.  Major surprise...Wisconsin is a beautiful state!  It is neat, clean, garbage and trash free including the low income areas and everywhere we went there the flowers were gorgeous and the people friendly.  I think Debbie would agree we enjoyed our time in this state as there were flowers everywhere you looked.  The scenery was beautiful.  The U P or Upper Peninsula of Michigan was the most boring and sleep inducing of the scenery we saw.  Miles of nothing.  However, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is beautiful and very worth the trip there.  However, if the weather had not been as beautiful as it was the day we took the cruise, I don't know that my opinion would have been the same.  Sault Ste. Marie was a cute little town and seeing the locks and International Bridge was very cool.  Again, we had great weather and although it was cool, it was sunny.  It is amazing when you look on a map and see how far north you really are there.  St. Ignace and Mackinac Island were very nice and we enjoyed that as well.  Sleeping Bear Dunes was not what we expected and I felt a waste of the time it took to find it.  However, Traverse City which we had to go through to get there was a beautiful and picturesque lakeside town.  We of course stopped at the pie place there but it was just a very pretty place.  The balance of our time in Michigan was just ok.  Debbie did a lot of driving for little reward in the list of things she wanted to see.  The covered bridge was cool but even though we could drive over it, it wasn't nearly as pretty as the ones we saw in New England.  It took us forever to find it too.  The surprise was Shipshewana, Indiana.  It was a cute Amish community just across the state line from Michigan.  Debbie and I both enjoyed shopping in their bulk grocery store, seeing the buggy's and locals on their bicycles.  We thought we would see more of it as we drove the "Heritage Trail".  We stopped in Middlebury but didn't find it as much fun as it was in Shipshewana.  Betty got us all messed up again in Elkhart which Debbie knew was the trailer and RV capital of the world.  It was true...Most major RV brands had factories there.  Other than that, not much else that I can remember as noteworthy.  I have joined Debbie and Kay in the 50 club.  We now can concentrate on visiting the states we liked the most.

As usual, thanks to my friend Dave, Carol Calvin and Kay this time for being faithful blog followers even if you had to wait until I got home to read this one.

Indiana Jones and the Amish…July 27, 2015

We loaded the car and headed south to the Amish Country of Indiana.  Small communities along the upper portion of Indiana on country roads.  We first went to Shipshewana and it was a beautiful little town with everything Amish.  It had buggy’s, bicycles, flowers, shops, bakeries and lots of other shops.  Debbie had some specific things she was looking for and found all but one of them while we were going from store to store.  We had a great time looking at everything in the meat and cheese store too.  They had many things like ring bologna that I used to get when I lived in Pennsylvania.  The Amish would come to a place called Booth’s Corner on Friday and Saturdays to sell their meats, cheese and baked goods.  I took Debbie there when we went to New Jersey and she bought so much stuff and took it home with her.  I would have bought many more things if I had a way to get them home.  It was really fun.  We did drive to Middlebury next and went through some shops there but nothing after our first stop would measure up.  We spent some time getting lost in other places and by the time we gave up and started to head to our final stop over for the night we realized we were only an hour from Fort Wayne.  We decided to go on to Indianapolis and did some quick changes to our reservations and found a hotel.  We pulled into the parking lot at the Hampton Inn at 5:30 PM…yay.  No real driving tomorrow which is good.  I need to reorganize the things I bought since I will be flying home on Wednesday.  We are both whipped tonight and we are going to relax and get a good night’s sleep.  Day eleven is in the books and the last day is coming up tomorrow.

Holland – July 26, 2015

We had a leisurely morning getting ready since our drive was only about an hour and a half.  Since it was Sunday, nothing much will be open before noon so we take our time.  We have researched this city and “supposedly” the downtown looks like the buildings in Holland, Amsterdam.  There is major road work going on as we enter the city and not only is it difficult to drive through but there are no signs to direct you.  Some of the streets are completely blocked and others are one way.  We are through the city and out twice already before we find a sign that says “Windmill Island Gardens”.  We follow the signs and miss the turn off….again.  After going down a one way street the wrong way and getting stuck at a dead end street we finally find it.   Not what was described and now they want us to pay to get in to see the windmill and the shops and gardens.  We decide it wasn’t worth the price and took photos and left.  We did find Lake Michigan and the park and it was a beautiful.  We took a bunch of pictures there and then decided since it was still early, we would find the covered bridge that was first on our list for tomorrow.  We again have difficulty finding it but did find it in the end.  It was very cool and interesting since you could actually drive over it.  We enjoyed it and we were glad we made the effort.  We stopped on the way back to Kalamazoo and had lunch.  Since it was just 2 PM, we decided rather than go to the hotel and be lazy, we would drive another 20 miles north past the hotel and spend a couple hours at the Gun Lake Casino.  It was packed and quite a large place.  We stayed for about two and a half hours and had a fun time.  We headed back to the hotel and stopped on the way for dinner.  When we got back to the hotel, I did laundry and we are watching some TV.  Tomorrow we head south to Indiana into Amish country and then will spend the night in Ft. Wayne.  Our adventure is rapidly coming to an end.

Sleeping Bear Dunes – July 25, 2015

We were up, dressed, coffee in hand and in the car by 8 AM this morning.  This is our longest driving day and this happened because we couldn’t find a place to stay.  We heard others in the hotel talking about it too.  It started raining on us while we were loading the car and poured for much of the way to Traverse City before clearing up and the sun peeking through the clouds.  We stopped at a roadside stand and bought some cherries.  They are in season here right now.  While chatting after that Debbie said she needed to turn around because there was something I needed to see.  This was so funny….it was a tree just covered in pairs of shoes!  It really was too funny for words…a shoe tree.  By the time we reached Traverse City the sun was shining.  Debbie had found this bakery she wanted to find called the Grand Traverse Pie Company.  We find it and go in and got two slices of cherry pie and had the cherry coffee with it….yummy!  It was oh so good that we got a small pie to go and Debbie bought some of the coffee to take home.  We attempted to find the lighthouse on the peninsula but that didn’t go well.  There were no signs to help either so we gave up.  The scenery was beautiful and this city is just a gorgeous, upscale seaside town.

From there our goal was to find Sleeping Bear Dunes which is a National Park.  We were taken on quite the round about trip through many back roads and finally came to the dunes.  Also not what we expected.  Debbie was excited to get her Senior Park Pass since she is now old enough to get one.  They are valuable as you get in free to most of the parks or pay a much reduced fee is there is one.  We used mine when we did all the parks out west a few years ago.  Anyway we go in and watch people on this giant dune try to climb to the top.  The kids were having a blast while most adults sank up to their knees in the sand and were frustrated.  We decided to forego the dunes and move on to try to find the beautiful lighthouse at Ludington.  This is where Bitchin Betty our GPS took us on an unusual detour through dense woods on a dirt road that was only wide enough for one car.  I was relieved when we came out to see a real road at the end of the forest!  We drove to Ludington and found the lighthouse.  It was pretty but I guess the pictures we saw did it more justice than being there in person.  It was a cute little town though.  By now it is afternoon and we hadn’t eaten anything since pie that morning so we started looking for a place to have lunch.  We get to the little lakeside town of Pentwater and had lunch outside at the Village Café.  When the breeze started blowing off the lake we thought we should have brought our jackets as it got a bit chilly.  We saw a bride and groom wandering around the street with a couple others from their wedding party we assumed.   When we finished we got on the road to our final destination of Kalamazoo.  It was another two and a half hours of driving before we arrived.  We got checked into the Hampton Inn where we will spend tonight and tomorrow night.  We ordered pizza and it was really good or we were really hungry.  Now we are in stare mode and tired from another active day. 

 

This is the road Betty told us to take...dirt and we were on it for a few miles!