We got up early, today, and had the breakfast part of our bed & breakfast. It was delicious… and very filling. We weren’t hungry for hours and hours, which was good, because we took a ride out to Kalamazoo and barely got out of the car for the next three or four [or maybe more] hours. The indoor flea market had about twenty vendors, if that, and there wasn’t much, beyond one charming little book, worth our drive out there. Then we got lost driving around downtown Kalamazoo. There doesn’t seem to be much to the town, nothing that made us want to get out of the car. Then we started heading out of town, and saw a nice “Rare” book store. Unfortunately, it had a sign in the window that said, “back by 2.30 or earlier.” I think that was sometime around noon.
So we continued back, trying to come up with a plan… going over the things we may or may not have seen on the michigan tourism websites… when we saw a billboard for a guitar factory. I had never heard of Wechter, but thought it might be cool, so we took the exit. It was fairly impossible to find, we went back and forth in every direction from that exit a couple times, while we struggled to find address information on my phone’s mini internet browser. We did finally end up finding it, and it turned out to be a room with about 15 guitars in it. On the way there, we started heading back on the Red Arrow Highway, instead of the interstate, since we had read somewhere that there were a lot of antique dealers on that road spanning several towns. We stopped at a few, but most of the ones we passed were closed… and the Red Arrow Highway somehow disappeared when we got too close to a small airport. When we tried to follow the signs to stay on it, we ended up going around in a circle. We had to break out the GPS to find our way back. It turned out that the Red Arrow Highway didn’t really exist for about 10-20 miles.
We finally felt hungry again, and decided on pizza at the Stray Dog. The logo seems like a take off on the black dog tavern, of Martha’s Vineyard and yuppie-status-symbol fame, and it is a vacation/beach town, and there is a co-founder/chef from the east coast… but the place had it’s own cool vibe and excellent food. We probably didn’t really have the stomach space for it, but we also went to a pig-themed ice cream shop, down the street.
There are some weird signs out here. Making an illegal U-Turn warrants a bright yellow sad face, and there are big boxes hanging along with the streetlights that say Left Only. Often, it seems like they’re there instead of just painting left only on the lane. Sometimes it seems likes not enough, and sometimes it seems redundant. A left turning lane isn’t that difficult a concept is it? There was one intersection with a box above each of three streetlights, one said left, one said right and the middle one said “thru” … I didn’t notice if it was also painted in the lanes on the road, but the green arrows certainly said exactly the same thing.
Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow. Haven’t quite figured out what time we have to leave to get home in time for Sarah to change for work and get there on time, but we have the time zone change working for us this time. I think we have one other store that we definitely want to hit before leaving the area. I took some pictures of some of the things I mentioned, but I don’t have the card reader in the room, so you’ll just have to be patient. I’ll probably take some more pictures tomorrow and then upload them all when we get home. Still doesn’t look like we’ll get any sun, though. I would’ve had a lot more pictures, if we did.
0 Responses to “Michigan’s weird”