At lunchtime we arrived in the lovely town of South Haven. The last few days the weather in DC has been getting warmer, on Friday it was 20°C so it was a bit of a shock when we got out of the car and it was well below freezing! We walked through the town to Lake Michigan. The lake was frozen and covered in snow, it looked beautiful. We walked along a walkway out to a small lighthouse but it was so cold that we didn't hang about too long before walking back into town for some lunch.
After lunch we got back in the car and drove a bit further north to Saugatuck. We headed straight for Oval Beach which is supposed to be one of the best beaches in America. The beach and lake were frozen, it looked amazing. To get close to the lake we had to walk across a frozen stretch of water, Chris was assuring me that it wasn't deep and wasn't going to break but I sent him over first to test the way! We spent quite a while walking up and down the beach taking loads of photos before we decided it was time to go back to the town for a hot drink. The town Saugatuck was really nice and it would be great to try to come back to visit in the summer if we have time.
Late afternoon we headed for our next stop Ann Arbor. By the time we arrived we were pretty tired so we found a Holiday Inn and just had dinner at a restaurant near the hotel.
On Sunday morning we went into Ann Arbor to explore. We started off with breakfast in Angelo's, which seemed to be the place to be on a sunday morning. We walked in at 9.30am and were lucky to get seated straightaway, a few minutes later they were queuing out the door.
After breakfast we walked around the town which is home to the University of Michigan. The university was huge and the buildings and facilities looked great but that's what you get when you're paying about $40,000 a year in fees! We went into the M Den shop which sells college merchandise. The store was enormous and as well as clothes you could buy just about anything you can think of in the college colours so we got ourselves kitted out with some t shirts and sweaters.
We'd heard weather reports that there was a snow storm on the way so we decided not to hang around in Ann Arbor too long and headed back east towards Ohio and away from the storm. But before leaving Michigan we made one final stop at a store that I'd read about - Cabela's.
There are quite a few outdoor stores in America that sell camping and hunting gear (including guns!) and Chris and I find them interesting to walk around. But Cabela's was unbelieveable! It was HUGE and had a mountain covered in stuffed animals in the middle of it. We weren't sure if the animals were real or fake on the mountain but at the side of the store was another section of animals which made us realise that they were all real! There was an elephant that the owner of the store had killed, along with a rhino, a lion and loads of other animals. They all had the pictures of Mr Cabela proudly sitting next to the animals that he had just shot. It actually made me feel sick and even though I took a photo of it, I'm not putting it on here because it's horrible to see a stuffed elephant.
The snow started catching us up as we were driving towards the Ohio border. We had planned to stop off at Sandusky on the edge of Lake Erie but we decided it wouldn't be much fun wondering around in the snow so carried on to Cleveland.
We had managed to outrun the snow by the time we arrived in Cleveland so went straight to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If you're really interested in music, you would love this place, it's really well done. Chris enjoyed it and I thought it was fine but for me there are more interesting places to visit.
We spent a couple of hours in the exhibitions and when we came out we saw that the snow had caught us up so we decided to drive home before we ended up getting stuck in Cleveland. We left at about 5.30pm and after about half an hour the snow started to come down heavily. Eventually it turned to rain but it wasn't great conditions for driving in so it was slow going. We stopped for coffee (and to pick up Ohio and Cleveland Starbucks mugs to add to our city mug collection) and then stopped for dinner at about 9.30pm in a Denny's diner.
After leaving the diner we were driving along and suddenly we drove into really thick fog and couldn't see anything in front of us. Chris had to virtually stop the car on the interstate, we just couldn't see the road. We crawled along and eventually caught up with another car which we followed until the fog cleared. We finally arrived home just after midnight but luckily with the bank holiday Monday we didn't need to worry about getting up for work in the morning.
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