As has been our habit recently, we didn’t really plan this vacation up front, except for the general direction we were going to go. We’ve found that if we travel to an area, look around, and ask questions that we usually end up having a better trip that the one we thought we were going to take beforehand.
We arrived in Holland, Michigan early yasterday afternoon, and spent the day looking around. Honestly, outside of the Tulip Festival that they have in May, there’s not a whole lot to see here. We skipped a couple of the more famous tourist traps, but made it to the local Delft pottery and Wooden shoe factory. In the evening, we walked through the downtown area, and then went to the beach.
We knew that we wanted to visit some of the dunes along Lake Michigan today, and after checking around, the locals indicated that the dunes on Silver Lake (1.5 hours away) were generally better than the ones at Saugatuck (only 20 minutes away). So we decided to go on to Silver Lake, which turned out to be the right choice. It’s hard to get a feel for the scale of the dunes from a picture, but here goes:
It’s pretty impressive to see, and even more impressive to see Silver Lake on one side with all the surrounding forest and Lake Michigan on the other. It’s like a desert plopped down in the middle of one of the most fertile areas on earth.
We took a jeep ride over the dunes and then came back to climb them on foot. Climbing is hard work because the sand has so much give and it is very hot in the midday sun.
Later, we went to a u-pick blueberry patch, which the girls thought was loads of fun. We picked about 6 pounds of blueberries with which we plan to do all manner of things when we return home, assuming any of them are left.
The final adventure of the day was a short trip to the Shelby Gem Factory, which grows “simulated” and “synthetic” gemstones. It was interesting to see the process, and honestly, they had some beautiful stones.
We started planning our Friday activities this evening, though, and we got a surprise. One of the few things we had planned to go see on this trip was Kellogg’s Cereal City in Battle Creek, mostly due to how happy we had been with out trip to the Coca-Cola Museum back in March. Unfortunately, when we were finally getting around to looking up the details we discovered that it has closed permanently.
Roadside America wasn’t very kind to Cereal City in its review in any case, although I suspect we would have still enjoyed it.
So we were left with a big hole in our schedule. After some frantic research, we’ve decided to go to the town of Frankenmuth instead, which we had considered intially, but then decied it was going to be too far out of the way if we were going to Battle Creek. We think we’ve found some activities that will be a lot of fun. We’ll see how it turns out, and I’ll report back 
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Local Tags: beach, blueberries, carissa, celia, cereal city, coca-cola, factory, festival, frankenmuth, holland, ken, lake michigan, michigan, park, sadie, sandi, shelby gem factory, silver lake, vacation
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