Michigan
After our first stop home, James and I ventured onto what we called The Second Leg of the Trip™. Not actually trademarked, it just feels like it should be. We went from Chicago to my aunt and uncle’s lovely cabin in Three Oaks, Michigan. We did a lot of hiking at Chikaming Township Park & Preserve, Warren Woods State Park, and Warren Dunes State Park. It was gorgeous. James became a grill master and an expert at cooking eggs over the bottle top camper stove because the propane tank at the cabin wasn’t working and the soonest someone could come out to fix it was after we’d have already left. We enjoyed time playing games and listening to music on the screened in porch, having a bonfire, and exploring the area. They really have such a nice getaway in Michigan. My only regret is not taking time off work for our stay at the cabin. There’s no wifi there (as it should be), so we ventured to a coffee shop, library, and brewery when we needed to get some work done.
The coffee shop in Sawyer called Infusco was an amazing little place with great coffee and it was perfect for remote work. I had been to Greenbush Brewing Co before and it was fun to take James there for lunch and a couple of beers. Working from a brewery has become my new favorite thing. We spent some time at the Three Oaks Township Public Library one day and James was in heaven—the library had resident cats that absolutely adored him! We walked around Three Oaks and had a nice dinner at Journeyman Distillery. It was honestly a dream! We’re so grateful to the Connollys for letting us enjoy their little piece of paradise. Lake Michigan in the summer is just so beautiful.
After Three Oaks, we drove east toward Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have a friend that lived there for a while who gave us recs and we’ve both heard great things about Ann Arbor, so we decided to spend some time there. We stayed at a place that felt like a fancy hostel (i.e. private rooms with a shared kitchen and living space) but we’re pretty sure we were the only ones there. There were several buildings in the complex with other people walking around but we basically had our building to ourselves, which was kind of nice. It was near the Michigan football stadium so I’d imagine that during the fall it would be really busy around there. In the summertime, though, it was pretty quiet.
We enjoyed some time walking around the University of Michigan’s Nichols Arboretum and happened to be there right during peak peony season. Couldn’t have planned it better if we tried! We went to the Jolly Pumpkin for a flight of beer, Nickels Arcade historic shopping district for a walk and a coffee at Comet Coffee (delicious and adorable) and Bløm Meadworks for some cider, mead, and board games. We walked around downtown and looked at some murals, stumbled upon Ann Arbor Summer Fest aka A2SF (again, could not have planned this better if we tried) and listened to some live music. Went to a Farmer’s Market and had delightful meals at a vegan restaurant called Detroit Street Filling Station and a vegetarian place called Seva. We also went to the University’s Museum of Natural History and donated $10 each for admission and still have not stopped receiving letters addressed to my parents’ house from the University of Michigan asking us to donate again. The museum was incredible, though. They had a great exhibit about COVID-19 that brought me to tears and giant exhibits about space, dinosaurs, rocks and minerals, you name it. Definitely one of the better museums we’ve been to and it’s FREE (hence the donation and consecutive solicitations for more money).
Overall, Ann Arbor was a lot of fun. It’s a very politically active city and we had to dodge several petitioners and/or explain that we’re not from there. We had a couple of odd interactions with people that left a bad taste in my mouth but looking back it was a very nice place and I’m willing to overlook that. Generally speaking, we compare every college town to Bloomington and none of them have quite measured up but Ann Arbor definitely had lots of similarities.
After Ann Arbor, we made our way to Detroit. You know what? Detroit gets a bad rap. I thought it was a really cool city! We had lots of recommendations from our friend Emily (and we now know her friend Tory, who is from Detroit and is the originator of said recommendations), so I’m sure that helped. We stayed in a Sonder (see my blog post about Atlanta for how much we love Sonder) that was right in the middle of downtown Detroit. We had a view of the Wayne County Building and were walking distance from Hart Plaza and the Detroit River, meaning we could wave to Canada. Our challenge was that our parking spot from Spot Hero did not have in and out privileges, which we didn’t realize until after I had gone grocery shopping and had to call someone to get let back into the parking garage. So we tried to do Detroit with only public transit. It’s probably not the worst city in the world for public transit, but being named Motor City because it put itself on the map with the car industry, it was certainly not the best city for public transit either. We made the most of it.
We had fun taking the street car out to Midtown and exploring some breweries: Motor City Brewing Works, Detroit Shipping Co food hall and beer garden, and Founders, which is actually based in Grand Rapids but they had a taproom in Detroit. I just Googled it and apparently they’ve permanently closed that location and were sued for racial discrimination in 2019, which I did not know when we went there and sued again for racial discrimination in 2023 before they closed. 👀 Welp, good to know where not to go in the future! We went to dinner at a great noodle bar called Ima and walked around looking at murals and gorgeous historic buildings. The Guardian Building was one of my favorites. Just absolutely gorgeous details. We went to a library to work one day because I can’t stand sitting in the same room all day long and it was another gorgeous building. We also hit up the GM headquarters which is a behemoth/cluster of buildings and just fun to walk around and look at all the cars. We had a couple of frustrating experiences with buses not showing up, walking around in the heat and a restaurant that was recommended to us being closed. I also dragged James all the way out to the outskirts of town to go Goodwill only to find ourselves at the Goodwill Career Center, not a thrift store. Moral of the story is you might want to have a car in Detroit. What really makes it a great city is the people. People in Detroit are so friendly and proud to be from there. They are a little protective of people using a hand to describe their location (even if you’re from Wisconsin and you’ve used your hand to describe Wisconsin cities your whole life, it is completely invalid if you do it around someone who is from Michigan because they get full ownership of all hand maps because they are the Mitten State, duh). Other than that though, they’re very cool.
This summer we were lucky enough to go back to Detroit for a brief stop on our way to our friends’ bachelor and bachelorette parties. This time we had a tour guide (see Tory mentioned above) and a free place to park the car so we had even more fun. Tory and her husband Steve are literally tour guides (that’s in addition to their day jobs—they are cool people) with a wealth of knowledge about Detroit. It was fun to hear about the city’s history while we explored. It would have been cool to see Detroit during its peak, before all the redlining and white flight. Its history with racism shares similarities with Milwaukee. Tory took us to Pie Sci Pizza to have our first ever Detroit-style pizza and not be dramatic but my life was changed for the better. We wandered around some cool shops and went for a drink at their friend’s bar, Castalia, which is a really cool cocktail bar in the basement of a Victorian mansion with a fragrance sister company. The cocktails are paired with fragrances for a sensory experience. It sounds hipstery and pretentious (maybe it is?) but it was so, so cool. And the drinks—both cocktails and mocktails—were fantastic. I also got coffee with a former Marquette classmate who lives in Detroit and had a great time catching up with her.
Long story short, Detroit is cool and maybe it’s time to learn more about it and challenge your beliefs about it. It definitely was time for me to do that.
