Thumbs Up

Last weekend, the humans took off and left us again. They visited the eastern side of the mitten this time rather than going up north like they did last year.

Here's a map of the places they went:

Thursday Evening:

After driving through a vast expanse of tranquil farmland, they drove past Flint, Michigan, home of the infamous Flint water crisis. Shortly after crossing the Flint River, Mom and her sister noted a sign for an unfortunately-named Flushing Road.

They headed north and arrived in Frankenmuth, Michigan before sunset. Frankenmuth is known as Michigan's "Little Bavaria" because of its Bavarian-style architecture.

(Bavaria is a state in southeastern Germany)

Their hotel's architecture did not disappoint:

Each room in the hotel is named after a family of the area's original German settlers. Theirs was named after the Bartels. 

Another big draw of the hotel was its three pool areas. After wandering around and eventually finding all three (as well as an enormous arcade and a mini golf course) they elected to visit the kid-free Courtyard Pool. 

Friday:

The group began their day with breakfast at the Frankenmuth McDonalds. (The hotel, sadly, did not offer complimentary breakfast.) They were hoping it would be Bavarian-themed, and it did not disappoint either!

The group then drove north around Saginaw Bay, eventually arriving in Tawas Point State Park, home of Tawas Point Lighthouse.

Before their guided tour of the lighthouse, Mom and her sister walked down to the water. 

It was quite marshy, and their entrance sent lots of camouflaged frogs hopping. Mom's sister freaked out a bit. Mom, who doesn't mind them, took some photos. Here's one of a not-so-camo trio:

Mom says that the lighthouse tour was really interesting. Each room was staged to represent a different decade of the lighthouse's history. Everybody, even Mom's winding-staircases-make-me-dizzy aunt made it up all 85 steps to the top, where they got up close and personal with the Fresnel lens and a spider convention. 

Most of the spiders were on the outside of the glass, but this big one was definitely inside. 

Yuck. Once you look past the spiders, the view was great. As you can see from this shot, though, Tawas Point actually extends way farther out than than the lighthouse - over half a mile, in fact.

Accretion, the opposite of erosion, has been happening to this point for some time. (That is, the water is shifting sand so that the point continues to lengthen.) The original lighthouse was built at the end of the point in 1852, and by 1867, the point had already gotten about a mile longer. That lighthouse was torn down, and the "new" one (the one they toured) was finished by 1877. The function of the lighthouse has now been replaced by a not-nearly-so-picturesque light on scaffolding at the current end of the point. Mom and the others walked down the trail to see it after the tour, and were the frogs ever hopping!

Before they left, they stopped to poke around the fog signal building, which is now a gift shop. 

The man on the picnic table lied there for a good 15 minutes at least. XD

Mom got two souvenirs here, a t-shirt and a small lighthouse cross-stitch kit. The gift shop had kits for just two lighthouses left, neither of them Tawas Point. But, as fate would have it, one of them was Mom's favorite lighthouse from last summer, Old Presque Isle. It was meant to be!

After a food stop at a really slow Tim Horton's that was out of bread and then another long drive, they arrived back in Frankenmuth. Their destination: Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, "the world's largest Christmas store." Sure, it may have been August, but so what? It's always Christmas at Bronner's.

The grounds around the store are also decorated for Christmas, a hodgepodge of nativities and North Pole-themed displays. One of Mom's favorites was this:

The store is indeed enormous. It has gone all out with the decorations inside too, and between that and the Christmas music playing, it's hard not to get into the Christmas-y mood.

Mom and crew focused their attention on the overwhelming rows after rows of Christmas ornaments, though Mom was also intrigued by the miniature Christmas scenes and the Trail of Painted Ponies area (not sure why the store had the ponies...). She ended up buying a really cute furry black lab ornament (it reminded her of Pepsi <3) and a cloth elephant ornament (it was really cool and had been made in Uganda!) She - surprisingly - showed the most restraint. Everybody else ended up with around a half dozen ornaments each. =)

They enjoyed supper at Cracker Barrel and then returned to the hotel to swim in all three pools. One pool area had a big, really deep hot tub and a mural on the wall including cartoon alligators dressed in traditional German garb. The second had color-changing lights and two water slides but was full of wild kids. Mom and her sister went down the tube slide a few times - it was a dark, enclosed tube with lots of colorful flashing lights inside. Every time mom was in the back of the tube, they ended up coming out backwards. 

Saturday

Everybody packed up, said goodbye to the hotel, and stopped at Frankenmuth's Tim Horton's for breakfast (their Tim Bits are awesome.) They embarked on another long drive, this time all the way to the tip of Michigan's thumb to the other lighthouse on the agenda, Harbor Beach Lighthouse.

Lake Huron can get pretty dangerous when it gets stormy, and there have been dozens of shipwrecks in the area near Harbor Beach. In the 1880s, the harbor was created by building a really long breakwater out into Lake Huron. When bad weather crops up, ships can take refuge in the calm waters of the harbor. At the very end of the middle breakwater, the lighthouse was built. 

It may look like you could walk all the way down the breakwater from the beach to reach the lighthouse, but it there's a 300-foot gap in it long before you reach it. Hence the only way to get there (safely) is by boat.

While they waited for our boat, they chatted with the volunteers and admired this big sweetie:

Later in the day, he was going to his first therapy dog training class. <3

The boat took Mom's group out to the lighthouse. It's a rather short, squat one. The lighthouse itself is original, but the fog signal building next to it is an under-construction replica - the original was unceremoniously torn down in the 1960's. 

This lighthouse doesn't have the typical huge spiral staircase up to the light. Instead, it has 6 rooms sitting on top of each other. The bottom is a living and eating area, the second is the bedroom for the assistant keeper, the third is the bedroom for the keeper, the fourth is a workroom, the fifth has an open air deck, and a ladder brings you up to the 6th, home of the light itself.

Here's one of the bedrooms:

Looking up at the light:

The view from the deck:

Even on a fairly calm day, the water does look calmer in the harbor than out.

After the tour, they took the boat back to the beach. On the drive out of the Thumb, they stopped at a city called Bad Axe for pizza. There were indeed some signs with broken axes on them. According to Wikipedia, the name dates back to 1861, when Captain Papst was surveying the Huron County wilderness for the first road to be built through it. He stopped to camp on the future site of the city and found a badly damaged axe there. Hence he named the site Bad Axe, and the name stuck. XD

The last stop of the trip was Birch Run Outlet Mall, just a bit south of Frankenmuth. Mom is not a big shopper, but she still enjoyed walking around and helping the rest of the group look for what they were after. By the time they left, the back of the car was chock full of luggage and the others' new purchases. The cooler invaded Mom's foot space, but on the plus side, she had easy access to the drinks and Clementines, which were by then having a pool party in the melted ice water. 

Mom looked happy yet also a bit bummed out when she got home. I don't blame her - it always stinks when vacations are over. And now summer's almost over too. Blech. 

Oh well, time marches on, as always. Here's hoping for some more good, unexpected things to hop out at Mom and the rest of us as we forge ahead into fall. Preferably ones that aren't green and slimy.