Wes and I flew out to Michigan for the Tulip Time Festival in May (yes, it's taken me this long to get my photos and thoughts together 😑). Growing up, my parents had one of those big frames that you can put multiple pictures in hung up on the living room wall of us all the festival. That solidified the tulip as my favorite flower, and I wanted to re-experience frolicking in the fields as an adult. 🌷 ⚘ 🌷 Last year, Wes and I went camping in Arkansas (here, if you're interested - Pictures of neat stuff and some accompanying thoughts...: Wes and Erica's vacation photo album // Mount Magazine, AR // February 2023 (ragsreborn.blogspot.com) to relive his childhood memories so this year it's my turn to relive mine.
The festival was in Holland, MI, a tiny town with no airport, so we flew into Grand Rapids (I would have preferred that we drove). There were really bad storms & tornadoes the night before we flew out, so I was already on edge after abandoning the dogs at boarding camp and then watching the weather all night. Wes's friend took us to the airport before he had to log in for work, so we were there at like 4am with a night of zero sleep. 😫 Not the best start to a vacation, but we had a nice breakfast from Elemental Coffee and our flight out of town went smoothly.
I swear we spent more time in airports than we did actually on vacation. We already had a three-hour layover but the weather in Michigan was sketchy, so our layover kept😭getting😨extended😫. We ended up spending probably 5 or 6 hours there. In hindsight, we should have gone out to eat somewhere in Denver, but we were worried about time and having to go through airport security. Luckily, Denver International is gigantic with lots of things to keep travelers entertained. (The con to that pro is that there were TONS of people and a line to everything. It was insane when we got off of the fully packed plane and into the empty Grand Rapids airport. It was like stepping into a ghost town!)
I wanted to see the Yann Kersale exhibit (Water In All Its States) but it was installed in the escalator that led out of the terminal to baggage claim. Instead, we saw an exhibit by local artists who used recycled items to make art. The blue dresses were my favorite (my camera was not cooperating...the glare is pretty awful 😩 but the artwork was really neat in person). When I decided that we've walked around the airport enough, we settled into some chairs made from old skis and I started my crocheting. I saved a pattern for a basket made using a magic ring, but I could not wrap my head around the instructions. I restarted like probably 2 or 3 times then gave up and made an infinite granny square instead (as in keep adding rounds to the square until I ran out of the yarn I packed with me).
When it was FINALLY time to fly out, we all boarded onto one of the fancy ultra slick 737 Max 8s. ✈It was sooooo clean and so new (who cares about the questionable safety features that have been in the news 😰). It had red and blue lights like a party bus. LOL It's probably just my imagination, but even the off-brand Chex Mix tasted better. I finally fell asleep for a powernap. 😴 🛫 Originally, we were going to Uber from Grand Rapids to Holland and then spend most of our time walking but after reviewing some maps and talking to my pen pal who lives there, I decided to rent us a car. I got a sleek new Jetta that I did not know how to drive. LOL It wasn't that bad but I never got used to the keyless aspect. Luckily, traffic in Grand Rapids was extremely polite and forgiving. 🚘 No one passed me despite me struggling to get used to how the car drove on the highway.
So our first day of vacation was a long & exhausting day of hanging out in airports. *sigh* Our hotel was downtown, so I wanted to do a bit of exploring but we were both wiped out. We had dinner before turning in at the hotel. I googled what food Grand Rapids is known for and "wet burrito" came up. Then I looked up the highest rated wet burrito restaurant and got Maggie's Kitchen. Wet burritos are delicious!! 😋 (Wes still doesn't believe me.) They are also gigantic. I got the steak burrito, which stuffed to the max. My only complaint would be that the red sauce was a little bland (I thought a lot of the food in Michigan was), but they had really good spicy green salsa. Wes got the rice & pork tacos.
Our last stop before the hotel was the Woodland Mall; it has a Barnes & Noble which has my Unicornos. 🦄 Normally, we would have browsed the shops at the mall but we were tired, and storms were rolling in ☔ so we just made a beeline for the store. I double checked their inventory online but couldn't find my coveted figurine. I went upstairs where all the toys were; I asked a sales associate and she had no idea what Unicornos are. She asked if they were a toy, yes. Then she asked if they were a children's toy or adult collectible, both I guess. Still no luck, she had to call another employee for help. Turns out they're adult collectibles and downstairs with the nerdy stuff (think anime and Funko Pops). How embarrassing! LOL
The area of West Michigan about an hour away from us got pummeled with storms & tornadoes that night. (The weather must have followed us from Oklahoma.☁) Holland's City Council proactively put out a statement saying the tulips bloomed early this year, so they were kind of past their peak by mid-festival time, then the storms wiped out the remaining ones that weren't already wilted. 😞We flew in for the festival so tulips or no tulips, we're driving over!! But that will be blog for later; now, we're sticking with Grand Rapids. We spent a day being tourists in the city. We started with breakfast at the very upscale hotel restaurant, Margaux. We got yogurt with local honey, which I was surprised to notice that it actually did taste different from the Oklahoma honey I'm used to. I enjoyed my corned beef hash.
After breakfast, I had planned for us to walk to the Grand Rapids Downtown Market, but we skipped. We walked along the Gillet Bridge by the hotel and then rested until our next activity. It was sprinkling all day so not the best day for walking around anyway. Next on our itinerary was the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Meyer May House. 🏠
This is the second Frank Lloyd Wright house we've visited (the first was in Bentonville, AR). The Meyer May house was really neat but I think I like the Bachman Wilson house better. 🏡 This house didn't feel as homey/comfortable/cozy family as the Bachman Wilson house, which is crazy because it was built specifically for a family. The Meyer May house tour started with a video about its renovation by the Steelcase Company. 🔨 There was a ton of interesting information in the video (the woman presenting the video & introduction was very passionate about her work). Some things I remembered: the company wanted to restore the house to its original version, so they dismantled all the additions and used the brick & other materials from the new wings in the renovation, the carpet was unsalvageable but they found original color samples in other museums/archives and re-wove the living room carpet to look exactly like the original, they did the same thing with all the furniture in the house, the mural of flowers in the dining room was painted over dozens of times so the renovators had to chip all the layers away to recover it.
Meyer May (who designed and sold men's clothing) commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house for his family in 1909. He and his wife had just adopted two infants. 👪 Sadly, his wife passed not long after and when he remarried, he acquired two stepchildren. So, the house was definitely built for a large family... but it was the most unsafe, non-kid-friendly house I've ever seen! LOL There were no rails or banisters for the stairs, and there were sharp angles everywhere.
Our tour guide was a volunteer named Al (he's married to the woman who showed us the video at the beginning of the tour; they're both architecture nuts and have traveled the states viewing Frank Lloyd Wright structures & doing research). Al was a bit long-winded and rambley, but he was so incredibly knowledgeable. Wes's favorite part of the house was the dining room table that was designed to look like a temple. My favorite was either the closet with a pull-out rack of hangers, or the chairs that were the exact height as the wooden trim on the walls (so the chairs looked flush with the walls). It was an interesting tour and it was free as long as you booked tickets online in advance. Would 100% recommend! 👍
We had lunch at Tupelo Honey, another fancy restaurant inside of a hotel. (I noticed that downtown Grand Rapids isn't that grand... unless your establishment is inside of a hotel. On the flipside of that, we barely saw a single homeless person.) Brunch at Tupelo Honey ran until 3pm and we got there around 2:30pm so I got myself a blueberry lavender mimosa. 🍸 They're known for their chicken & waffles so that's what I ordered. 🍗 I got the mac n' cheese waffles, which I assumed were waffles made from mac n' cheese, but they just had some mac n' cheese smashed on top. A little disappointed but I still ate them all. It was very tasty. Their house pickles were spicier than the chicken! Wes got the shrimp & grits with Cajun sauce (butter and Cajun seasoning, which he said was goooooood).
We had some time to kill after lunch, so I drove us to Field's Fabrics. It is THE fabric chain in Michigan. There were a few locations in the Grand Rapids area and I picked the Plainfield location. OMG this place was amazing and so astonishingly cheap!!😍 They sold all sorts of fabric... quilting cotton (an obvious duh), all types of garment/fashion fabrics, and upholstery fabric, too. They had a lot of really thick, stretchy but still stable enough to be easy to work with, jersey/polyester blend fabrics. I wanted a couple of yards, but I wasn't a fan of any of the prints. 😞 Everything was marked 10-30% off! I saw some cute cottons that I wanted but told myself I was only buying one cut. I ended up with an interesting distressed sweatshirt type fabric. The fabric selection was amazing, but what I was most impressed with was their notions, tools and bag making supplies. It was all stuff that I need but hate to buy because it's usually so expensive. We were only travelling with carry-ons so I couldn't splurge but if we ever step foot in a Field's Fabrics again, it's all over for my bank account. LOL
Thursday evenings after 5pm were free at the art museum so we waited until later in the evening to go. There was a fashion gala type of event going on that night. A ton of tall & attractive important looking people streamed in wearing very upscale & fashion-forward clothes. I think that was the most exciting part of our museum visit (that and the bathrooms offered free period products, which I thought was impressive and should be the norm).
I'm glad it was a free night because the museum was a letdown. 😑 An entire floor of the museum was closed for renovations, and there wasn't much to view on the first and third floors. The only thing open on the second floor was the Lego exhibit. It wasn't much of an exhibit. There were a few things that local artists and schoolchildren built, and there was a section where you can use Lego to build your own art.
The first floor housed a temporary exhibit for a local Black artist (sorry, I forgot his name 😬). He paints himself into his work, and his work is always social commentary about the Black experience. I couldn't relate so I didn't fully understand his art but I did appreciate his skill. His paintings were very vibrant, but still realistic.
The permanent collection was on the third floor. There were seven galleries that lead you through a timeline of art history. I enjoyed the classic European paintings the best, but my favorite piece in the entire museum was from their contemporary collection. It was a modern sculpture of a stub-tailed dog.
Our last meal in town was at The Mitten Brewing Company. Grand Rapids is also known as "Beer City," and I do believe it. 🍺 There was a brewery on every corner! Funnily enough, I didn't drink a single beer while we were there. I mostly got cocktails, but I got a cider at the Mitten. Wes had beer and said it was good. I got an apple pie cider that tasted like yummy apple pie. 🍏 We did a lot of eating but not much walking that day so we weren't especially hungry. We skipped the appetizer and just ordered a pizza. We got the Return of the Goat, which was spicy sausage, goat cheese, basil, and sweet red peppers. A good pizza but I thought the sausage was a little too spicy. Maybe it needed a bit more goat cheese to balance it out. It was still Playoff season so Game 2 of the semifinals was on. We watched as much of it as we could before the restaurant closed. It was Mavericks 24, Thunder 22 by the time we left. We made small talk about the game, the Thunder and being from OKC with the valet when we got back to the hotel. Yay sports! 🏀 LOL
We had an early flight out the next day so we skipped breakfast. I told the Enterprise employee about our battery fiasco when I returned the car. He asked how much the replacement battery was. I had to rummage around my bag for the receipt. He must have been in a hurry because he goes, does a $50 refund sound okay? That was mighty generous! I finally found the receipt later and it was $7.41. The Grand Rapids airport "employs" three therapy dogs. They're supposed to be wandering around with their humans. I walked all over the tiny airport looking for them. No sign of any dogs 😔 We flew into Chicago Midway for our layover. It was a 2-hour layover but after grabbing coffee and quick meal, it felt like no time at all. We had a smooth flight home and another state crossed off our bucket list.
