A Weekend in Your City

I've been tagged by ExPat Mom for the A Weekend in Your City meme, started by Kailani. This looks like fun! :)

Here’s how it works. Pretend that you have out of town guests visiting your city for the very first time and you’re the tour guide. Where would you take them? What would you do? Then tag 5 other people so they can proudly show-off their hometown, too! Remember, you can only mention one thing in each category.

I'm expanding this slightly since there's a lot just outside my city but still in the area you could do in a weekend that's completely worth seeing. So, here's West Michigan in a nutshell (or a weekend anyway)...

Best Place to Eat: I don't know if it's the best, but my favorite is called Brann's Steakhouse and Grille. They're a local Michigan chain with 9 restaurants (7 in our area). We eat here on birthdays mainly since it's a bit expensive (for us anyway) but I love their salads and their yeast rolls. Not to mention the sizzling steak, of course! The girls like the mini pizzas on the kids menu. I also like that they're very family friendly and with only a couple of exceptions, we've always had great service. And the couple of times that we've had issues with the service - they've gone out of their way to make it right.

Best Shopping Mall: There are a couple of great malls here in town, but my favorite is still really the one where we used to live, 30 minutes away. The Lakes Mall was built right after Abby was born and I was thrilled to actually have a mall in town. I loved being able to take her (and later Hannah too) to play and just get out of the house. Not to mention the shopping, of course! It's not a huge mall, but it's one of the best I've ever shopped at. Somehow it just has the right mix of stores, and a fun play area for the kids.


Famous Landmark: There's not one specific thing that comes to mind on this one - we don't have mountains or anything that necessarily stands out as a landmark. But, what we do have (nearby) is Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan is the only one of the great lakes that is located entirely within the US, and is the largest freshwater lake in the country. It's also a huge source of tourism in the area, offering awesome beaches, sand dunes, boating, fishing, hiking and gorgeous sunsets (see below). I love that we're only a half hour away although with gas prices lately, we don't get over there as often as I would like.

Best Tourist Attraction: This would probably have to be the Frederick Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. It's become an international tourist destination and has 125 acres of sculpture park, gardens, a children's garden, nature trails and features sculptures by many very well known artists. One of the more popular ones is the Leonardo DaVinci American Horse. And every spring you can see their wonderful butterfly exhibit - we've been a couple of times and it's amazing.

Entertaining the Kids: We love the Grand Rapids Children's Museum. It's got 2 floors of fun activities and exhibits for kids of all ages and parents can join right in. Whether you want to make giant soap bubbles, create works of art, see yourselves on television, or build with all kinds of different materials, every kid I know has a blast there. There are even lots of things for smaller kids and babies like a special 'crawlers only' area where you don't have to worry about your little one getting run over or trampled by the 'big kids'.

Breathtaking Views: This we definitely have. There's almost nothing like a gorgeous sunset from atop the Lake Michigan sand dunes. Or even just from the beach. Words can't really describe it, so here's a couple of photos that I found online - I can't access the ones I've taken right now but I have many of my own too (not as good though). In any season, the view of the lake can be breathtaking...

Popular Outdoor Activity: Well, normally I'd say the beach, but I think I have that one pretty well covered in a couple of the other categories. So I'll say that this one would probably be Michigan's Adventure. It's the largest amusement park in Michigan and is actually made up of two parks - the amusement park and a large outdoor water park. It's "two parks for the price of one" as the commercials say. And it's also home to Shivering Timbers, one of the best wooden roller coasters in the world. I haven't been to the park in several years, but I'd love to take the girls now that they're getting a bit older and may even be brave enough to go on a few rides now. Or maybe we'll wait until our daredevil Becca is old enough to show her big sisters how it's done...

So that's it! If you're interested in a longer stay, I did a T13 post on the top 13 reasons I love West Michigan a little while back, so check that out too! :)

I am going to tag the following five people because I'd love to see more about where they live (only if they want to do it though):

Jen
Holly
Donetta
Anna
Michelle


Disclaimer: All photos obtained from the Internet and don't appear to be copyrighted - click on each photo to be taken to the original web page.

Thursday Thirteen #3 - All about West Michigan

I got this idea from Michelle over at Scribbit last week. She did a wonderful job showing off 13 pieces of art in Anchorage. I'm going a bit broader than art, but I wanted to show off the top 13 reasons that I love where we live. I hope I don't sound too much like a tourism commercial, but I had to include a lot of links - more fun that way, I think!

So here are the top 13 things that are awesome about living in West Michigan:

1. Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park – There are so many things to see and do here, like the annual butterfly exhibit and the Children’s Garden. Right now you can even see one of the 20 copies of Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker", on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts.

2. The “B. O. B.” (Big Old Building) – Four floors of food and fun in a renovated, converted warehouse building in downtown Grand Rapids. The B. O. B. offers, “each individual a different experience and houses several restaurants, a cigar lounge, a microbrewery, banquet rooms, a comedy club, a dance club, a billiards hall, live jazz and a wine cellar” (from the B. O. B. website).

3. Ada Covered Bridge – This covered bridge is on the National Register of Historic Places and is located in Ada, just east of Grand Rapids. It’s one of only 4 publicly owned covered bridges in Michigan.

4. Lighthouses – I’m lumping these all into one category – I’ll have to do my 13 favorite lighthouses on some other Thursday. The popular ones in West Michigan are the Grand Haven and Holland Harbor lighthouses. The White River lighthouse is also one of my favorites and has been turned into a museum. I love visiting lighthouses!

5. Beaches – Again, I’m lumping here, or I could fill the rest of this 13 just with beaches! But hands down, West Michigan has some of the most beautiful beaches around. Clean, white sand, fun waves to play in, no salt or tides to deal with and awesome sand dunes! Some of the nicest that I’ve been to around here are Kruse Park in Muskegon (has a boardwalk and steps you can climb up to the top of the dune for an awesome view), Hoffmaster State Park, Grand Haven State Park (you can walk along the river channel pier out to the lighthouse and beach and watch all the boats), and Oval Beach in Saugatuck.

6. The Grand Haven Musical Fountain – My friends and I used to go to this every year on July 4^th. I haven’t been since Abby was a baby, but we really should go again – the kids would love it. Until recently, this was the largest musical fountain in the world!

7. Michigan’s Adventure – Another place I haven’t been in a while but I think my kids are probably about ready for it (finally – they aren’t exactly big into thrills). This is a combination water park and amusement park (you get into both parks for one admission fee) and is the biggest amusement park in Michigan. It’s also home to Shivering Timbers, which is one of the best wooden roller coasters around.

8. Hiking, Camping and Fishing – I didn’t even know that Field & Stream had rated Grand Rapids the 6^th best fishing city in America! And that’s not counting all of the Lake Michigan fishing you can do around here too. I don’t fish, but I think it’s awesome that there are so many great opportunities here for it. I have been camping and hiking (mostly back when I was single since Ron is not a camper or a hiker) and whether you like rustic tent camping or all the amenities, you can pretty much find all kinds of great places to camp and hike in West Michigan.

9. Winter Sports – I am not a fan of being outside in the winter, in the cold and snow. But now that I have kids, I am very thankful to have someplace like the Muskegon Winter Sports Complex nearby. It even has one of the four luge tracks in the US! Not to mention that there are lots of other fun places to sled and ski - like Echo Valley, Timber Ridge or Bittersweet Ski Resort. Not to mention miles of trails for cross-country skiing, snowmobiling and various sledding hills all over.

10. Um, shopping! Ok, so we’re not New York or Chicago, but we’ve got wonderful shops and galleries in downtown Holland, Saugatuck and Grand Haven. Muskegon’s got an up-and-coming downtown and Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo’s downtowns are booming. Not to mention several great malls, an outlet mall and well, you can find just about anything you’d want.

11. Festivals, festivals, festivals! I think there’s something going on almost every weekend during the summer – no kidding! Like Tulip Time, Summer Celebration, Art Shows, and Air Shows. Then there’s the Coast Guard Festival, Festival of the Arts, Unity Music Festival, Irish Festival, Bike Time, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival and even a Baby Food Festival!

12. I love going to the theatre – I can’t afford to go as often now, but when I can, it’s wonderful having so many in the area to choose from! West Michigan is rich in the arts in general. There’s the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre, the Barn Theatre, Western Michigan University’s Miller Auditorium, and Grand Rapids’ Broadway Theatre Guild, Circle Theatre, DeVos Performance Hall, and Civic Theatre. Plus, the Frauenthal Center for the Performing Arts in Muskegon. We also have some awesome museums for everything from airplanes to fun for kids.

13. The new Gold Rush indoor water park at the Double JJ Resort. We haven’t been there yet (did I mention that our kids are scared of the local splash park?) but I hear that it’s a lot of fun. Maybe someday our kids will be ready for that sort of thing because Ron and I would love to try it out!

I’m sure there’s a lot that I either don’t know about or forgot, so here are the Top 10 Reasons to Visit Grand Rapids, and Michigan’s West Coast.

Check out more Thursday Thirteen posts!