This week I am with Jeff in northern Michigan. He drew 11 trips to this area for the year so now that school is over I decided to tag along on one. Grant is staying in Winfield with my parents this week so I have lots of quiet time during the day to work on homework while Jeff is busy visiting offices in the area. We meet up for lunch every day and then I head back to the hotel to continue working on homework {or maybe to watch a movie that I’ve rented from the local Redbox}.
We spent our first few days in Traverse City, MI. Here are a few photos from the coast. 
They have the cutest downtown area. We spent several hours on Monday browsing through all the little shops, eating cherry pie and we even saw Michael Moore. According to residents he lives with his wife just outside of town. A few other celebrities have homes in the area as well . . . Madonna, Tom Selleck and Demi Moore & Bruce Willis still own a home together. 
The hillsides all around town are filled with cherry orchards. Traverse City claims to be the “Cherry Capital of the World”. Each year they hold the annual Cherry Festival in early July. Too bad we didn’t schedule our trip a little later in the summer! 
While driving around town on Tuesday night we followed a sign to The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. After doing a little research we found out that it is a former insane asylum that has been partially redone. From the looks of things many of the building are either residential housing, offices, shops or restaurants.
Many of the building are still stand in their original form and let me just tell you they were super creepy. Many of them are boarded up and you can still see all the bars on the windows and fencing around the deck areas. It is definitely not the kind of place I would want to look at late at night from my apartment window across the street.
Just down the hill we found this headstone to where the asylum dairy cow was buried in 1932. It must have been some cow!!! 
Traverse City also has some of the cleanest, well maintained older homes I have ever seen. All of the city streets are lined with these adorable two-story homes. I couldn’t resist taking some pictures of a few as we drove along.
2 comments:
Nice pics! Makes me homesick.... I grew up in TC from 1972 and left in 1989. Still go back every few years. You think it was spooky driving around The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, you should have been driving around it at night when it was still a State Hospital.... People screaming, shaking the windows...
Mike from AZ-
You want to talk about creepy there are tunnels under the whole commons area now those are creepy
Post a Comment