chagrined: Marvel comics: zombie!Spider-Man, holding playing cards, saying "Brains?" (brains?)
KRIM ([personal profile] chagrined) wrote in [personal profile] corilannam 2012-07-20 11:44 am (UTC)

Toooooo bad I'm not in Michigan any more or I'd say you could come and visit me. :'D Southern Indiana isn't quite on your route unless you take a ~really~ meandering trip.

+1 on Mackinac Island if you DO go all the way up to the top of Michigan's lower peninsula. It's wonderful. I spent a week every summer there for six years working in the scout service camp, and then returned several times on other occasions as well. It is one of my favorite places. Beautiful state park if you like nature, gr8 bicycling around the island (no cars are allowed on the island), horses & carriages if you like that, fun touristy shopping, good fudge if you like fudge, historic Fort Mackinac and various other historic buildings if you like that type of thing, etc. The Grand Hotel is lovely (I recommend the gardens, and the porch is cool to walk on), but just go and visit it, don't stay there. There are cheaper places on the mainland if you only go for the day (take the ferry over/back), or if you do want to stay on the island I recommend one of the main/market street hotels instead, which imo have much nicer rooms (and put you in the middle of the shopping action).

Also +1 on Greenfield Village (in Dearborn, MI) if, again, you are into historical buildings and reenactments and stuff like that. And the Henry Ford Museum does have a pretty gr8 IMAX.

Also in Detroit, there are a couple of art museums, most notably the Detroit Institute of Art. I haven't been there in a long time but it was renovated a bunch a few years back and I hear it's good. The Diego Rivera murals there are excellent. The Detroit Science Center is okay but it's pretty much like all generic science museums. Sometimes they have cool temporary exhibits tho. Oh yeah, well, I also haven't been to this one in ages, but when I was a kid the Cranbook museums in Bloomfield Hills were always a favorite field trip, ha. (idk how gr8 they are for adults.) If you like fancy shopping malls, my hometown of Troy features the ridic ritzy Somerset collection.

Anyway but as museums (or shopping) go Chicago definitely has the edge on Detroit, ha.

If you like Ethiopian food and you drive anywhere near Ann Arbor, MI, you must ttly eat at The Blue Nile, which is excellent.

Depending on what day of the week / time of day you're crossing and of course where you're coming from in MI / going to in Canada, the Blue Water Bridge may be faster/less congested than the Ambassador Bridge or the tunnel. Though actually now I can't remember which one I took last time I went over, ha.

If you like gambling there are casinos in Detroit as well as in Windsor just over the Ambassador Bridge?

For more naturey up-north MI stuff, I hear the Sleeping Bear sand dunes are good, tho I've never actually been.

If you like roller coasters, Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH is pretty gr8.

Also if you drive out of Canada through Niagara Falls into NY, if you can swing through the Finger Lakes region, I recommend hitting some of the wineries and picking up some Rieslings. The two wineries I went to that I liked the best were the Thirsty Owl and Cayuga Ridge, which were conveniently right across the street from each other, heh.

Alas, I have never been to Wisconsin, so no help there.

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