We have a great honeymoon fast approaching and it’s summer. Reasonably, all I have on my brain is vacation, vacation, vacation! Honeymoon vacation, Lansing vacation, Door County vacation – any and all please!
Our honeymoon is all planned, scheduled and we’re ready to go, but we have yet to wrap our heads around when we’ll be able to make it, schedule-wise and financially speaking, to Lansing MI or Door County WI. Not to be extreme, but there’s also a trip home to Texas for Christmas in the works and in the future (um, far future) we’d also love to hit up Germany again for a week+ and take a legendary road trip across America, enjoying hand-picked sights, restaurants and personal areas of interest all across our beautiful country – a vintage “U.S. tour” if you will. Clearly we’re not floating in oodles of cash or anything, so that’ll have to wait until we find the oodles of cash tree. If you have any idea where that is, please let us know.
While we may not know when we’ll be going to Lansing or Door County, we certainly know what we’ll be doing while we’re there.
Lansing, MI
Lansing is the city where Ted and I first met working with some incredible people at BoarsHead Theatre. We dated and got engaged there. In Lansing Ted earned his Master’s degree in Technical Production & Design from Michigan State University and did a bunch of freelance lighting designs for area theatres while I broke into the world of equity theatre with my internship at BoarsHead. Lansing seemed pretty dreary at the time but we had plenty of fun and, looking back, we miss it dearly. We spent our time exploring the city and becoming regulars at our favorite joints. Here’s a few we have solid plans to revisit. It’s no coincidence at 95% of them involve food. Essentially, we plan to reconnect with our old haunts and eat our way across the capital of Michigan (fear not, it’s all in the portion control).
– Horrocks: The best grocery store/farmer’s market in Michigan! It was a short walk down the street from Ted’s apartment and stocked full of local, fresh off the farm produce, grains, spices and sauces, by-the-bottle wines and beer, wholesale candy, cheeses, meats, grind it yourself honey roasted peanut butter, and complimentary coffee. We’d walk to and fro with our bags full of apples, cheese and other goodies grown or produced a short distance away. I could have lived in this grocery store.
– Fitzgerald Park & Korner Kone: Our favorite park and ice cream stand located just a hop and a skip away in the tiny historic town of Grand Ledge, MI. Our park was home to a little summer theatre, and acres upon acres of rolling grassy meadows, hiking trails into the woods and along the Grand River, and a disc golf course. We’d meet one of our friends at Korner Kone for creamy, delicious hand-dipped ice cream.
– Golden Harvest: I could rave for years about this little breakfast joint. The restaurant, owned by a bunch of free-spirits with neon hair, nose rings and tattoo’d arms who grow some of the produce out in the back of the restaurant, has only has a handful of tables stuffed in cozy proximity to each other. There’s always a huge wait line stretching out the front door and past the 7 ft. tall sunflowers growing along the side of the building. The menu boasts unbelievably tasty and unique breakfast offerings and massive portions. The walls can hardly be seen because every available surface is covered with fliers, posters, oddball art, random dinosaur statues, old signs, gothic and hippie-inspired stuff and basically anything else you can possibly imagine. In short, it is heaven on earth.
– Leo’s Outpost: Our late night, post show, log cabin, animal-head furnished bar for drinks and unfathomably tasty thin crust pizza. It was the hang out for our family of theatre staff and actors after shows and a place for us to laugh or cry or vent or celebrate or simply catch up.
– Fleetwood’s All-Nighter Diner: A traditional black and white checkered all-nighter diner, perfect for a breakfast of hot coffee, omelets, and hippie hash casserole with broccoli, feta cheese and gyro meat. Delicious at 2 a.m., 11 a.m., 7 p.m. and any time in between.
– Tim Horton’s: Okay, so we lose a few brownie points because this is totally a chain – mostly in Canada. Incredible hot apple cider and a fresh array of doughnuts for a quick morning breakfast on a chilly winter day before work or after church. Need I say more?
– Stormfield Theatre & family: We met working at BoarsHead Theatre. Shortly after my internship was up and Ted was in his second year of his Master’s program at MSU, the Michigan economy died and with it, many of the arts organizations, including BoarsHead who could no longer afford to pay staff, professional actors or keep their doors open. So BoarsHead’s Artistic Director, not without a brave and courageous struggle, started a new professional theatre company and brought the staff with her. These people were our artistic family for our entire time in Lansing and we can’t wait to see a great stage production and catch up with our friends at Stormfield.
– Clara’s Lansing Station: Lansing’s “nice” restaurant located in an old original train station. One room of the restaurant is even housed in an old train car. This was the celebration restaurant where we’d go for special occasions – our engagement, parents vising town, Ted’s graduation, or dinner with friends or favorite visiting actors. This was the place you went for casual elegance, atmosphere, a round of cocktails, and phenomenal ribs and salads. It was classy, had a menu that was so large it read like a novel, and somehow still managed to be reasonably priced.
– Uncle John’s Cider Mill: In the summer it’s a fully operational farm and winery, and by autumn it becomes a pick your own pumpkin patch with legit corn maze, and apple orchard that produces wonderful cider. This is where we got engaged, so obviously it’s not only a blast but it also holds a special place in our hearts.
– Goodrich Quality Cinemas: Our old movie theatre! Even at regular pricing, we never paid more than $4.75 for a first-run movie ticket and with coupons from the frequent movie-goers club, splitting a popcorn and soda was only a few bucks more. Movies were often our entertainment of choice as even our poor intern and grad student salaries could accommodate it.
– Potter Park Zoo: The peacocks roam free. Roam free. As in, if I can get close enough to it, I can pet it. This, quite obviously, is incredibly exciting for me.
We can’t accomplish it all in two-and-a-half days so needless to say I’m leaving out a lot of our other favorites like Ted’s old apartment where we fed the colony of wild bunnies carrots on his back porch and played washers until dusk, or the Main Street of Williamston where we walked, or the BoarsHead Theatre building itself where we spent 75% of our time (I think it was demolished last year). I promise we did more than eat while we lived in Lansing…
Up next: Where we’ll be going on our (eventual) Door County vacation!
