June 15, 2012

Today I got to see Michigan for the first time!

Other than United calling at 2:50 a.m. to provide no message (a check online showed the flight was on time), it was a good day. (To be fair, the alarm was set for 3 a.m. to get to the airport in time for the 5:55 a.m. flight.)

We landed in Grand Rapids around 10 a.m. and headed to our first stop, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.

It was very cool. It was hard to tell what was better -- Nixon's resignation letter, 

Spiro Agnew's resignation letter to Ford, 

 

or tools used to break into the Watergate hotel. 

There was also a recreation of the Oval Office and one of the guns used in the two assassination attempts on Ford's life (one of the attempted shooters wrote him a letter from prison). 

And then there was the piece of the Berlin Wall in the lobby.

This museum is definitely worth a stop for anyone in the area. Make sure you budget two hours to see everything. This is a case of where you want to stop, read, and examine a lot. Afterward we found both Gerald and Betty Ford's grave sites (on site) and then took a walk along the Grand River. On our way to our hotel in Muskegon, we stopped at a diner for a burger (tasty, but didn't seem to be as big as the third-pounder advertised) and fries.


We next drove about 45 minutes to Grand Haven State Park, which is where the Grand Haven Lighthouse and Pier is located. We were there around 2:30-3 p.m. in the afternoon on a Friday and the place was hopping. Apparently the thing to do in Grand Haven is to walk to the lighthouse and back 0 it was like a mall during Christmas there were so many people (particularly teenagers; we definitely brought up the median age.)

The lighthouse looked nicer from afar (there was some paint peeling and graffiti on the back) and you couldn't go in it, but I'm glad we stopped, ... and I'm glad we got in the water. We heard the temperature got up to 89 today but it sure felt hotter than that, and after walking along and on the hot sand, it felt good to get up to our knees in the 56 degree water.

Our next stop was 12 miles away - P J Hoffmaster State Park. Because we had already paid for admission to the Grand Haven State Park, we didn't have to pay again, so that was cool. They had a sand dunes museum there. I didn't realize prior to planning this trip that they had sand dunes in Michigan. The dunes were different from the ones in Colorado and North Carolina because they were tree-covered. They looked more like hills. The museum provided some interesting information on the various parts of the dunes (beach, fore dune, back dune) as well as the wildlife that live there. They also had a beach area which was pretty empty by the time we were there after 5. With the sun not scheduled to set until 9:30 p.m. it felt more like noon than 5 so Jon decided to get in the water again ... this time all the way!

When we left Grand Haven State Park, they had a map on the wall of all of the lighthouses in the area. One of the lighthouses was one we hadn't read about previously, the Muskegon South Pier Lighthouse. This one was almost identical to the Grand Haven lighthouse, only it was in better condition, probably because it was behind a Coast Guard station. (They had directions painted on the road pointing to the lighthouse, with signs outside those lines warning against trespassing.)

Our final stop was our hotel in Muskegon, the Shoreline Inn, which looked like a haunted hotel, in my opinion.

The restaurant that had the best-sounding restaurant in the Muskegon guide we picked up (the Lake House Waterfront Grill) also happened to be right down the path from our hotel, and we were able to take advantage of call-ahead seating. I had a shrimp pasta dish that was good but the blue cheese sauce was a little overwhelming. The berry tart was perfect though, and the water was so refreshing! We also were able to eat outside, which made for some good people watching. There was one family in particular that had some young kids that looked like they wanted to be anywhere BUT their docked boat. And on the way out, we saw a dog barking at a swan that had come up to *his* boat, and the swan was just staring him down.

Before heading to the pool, we walked across the road and walked around downtown, which was set up for tomorrow's Taste of Muskegon event. We learned from a statue outside the restored movie theater (and site tonight of the Miss Michigan pageant) that Buster Keaton was from Muskegon. We also located the lumber baron mansions that we want to tour tomorrow. -- POSTED BY COLLEEN