Sat 2 Aug 2008
Frankenmuth and Chelsea
Posted by Ken Atherton under vacation
[5] Comments
We spent yesterday and part of today in Frankenmuth, Michigan. As I mentioned in our last post, this was a real-time decision we made after we found out that Kellogg’s Cereal City had gone out of business.
We enjoyed our time in the town. It reminded us a bit of some of the places we visited when we lived in Germany, and that is really the point. Frankenmuth was settled in the 1800s by a small group of German immigrants, made its name as a good place for lumberjacks heading north to pass through, and more recently has transitioned into a full-blown tourist town with a German theme.
By way of comparison, Frankenmuth is not nearly as “fun-at-all-costs” as Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, have become (although Frankenmuth has recently gotten a mirror maze), but there is more to do than a place like Brown County, Indiana.
We did a lot of shopping at the local artisan stores, made our own pretzels, turned ourselves into prunes at our hotel, had a good German style meal, and walked around in a daze at the world’s largest Christmas store.
All in all, Frankenmuth was a fine replacement destination for our original plan.
We spent most of the afternoon in Chelsea, Michigan, visiting the Chelsea Teddy Bear Factory. Whie the girls certainly enjoyed the trip, it was a little disappointing for Sandi. While the name says “factory”, there is precious little manufacturing going on at the site, so the tour was mostly a discussion of the different types of bears available in the gift shop. The factory is apparently a branch of one of the larger manufacturers of licensed college sports logo products, and most of the actual manufacturing goes on in China. The site in Chelsea only makes small quantities of two bear styles. One is a vey simple 2-piece design called “Pancake” and the other is a traditional articulated bear called “Connor” that is fairly expensive ($60), but clearly not in the realm of Steiff collectibles, which were also available on site.
Of course, none of the girls could be talked into the locally produced bears, so we ended up with three Chinese bears wearing personalized t-shirts that were printed at the shop.
For me, the highlight of the day was just accross the street from the Teddy Bears. It turns out that Chelsea is home to the Chelsea Milling Company, which is the company that produces “Jiffy” brand mixes. I remember many a meal in my youth eating Jiffy blueberry or corn muffins. I’m also a big fan of vintage advertising, and the logos outside the mill still have a very vintage quality to them. Unfortunately, the mill is closed on weekends, so a tour was out of the question.
Tomorrow we are going to wrap things up with a trip to the Henry Ford Museum.
Local Tags: advertising, carissa, celia, cereal city, chelsea, Christmas, factory, frankenmuth, gatlinburg, germany, indiana, jiffy mix, ken, michigan, paris, pretzel, sadie, sandi, teddy bear, tennessee
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