As lovely as Petosky was, we needed to hit the road. At night, the kids were missing home, and we needed to move them on to other things. Our next major stop was Chicago, which looks doable on a map, but the first two legs were long, so we wanted to break this one up. Also, my daughter had luckily ended up with Michigan for a school presentation, and she listed “Michigan’s Adventure,” an amusement park that ended up as one of her key MI features (not MoTown, not the Big Three… oh well). So we booked a room in the Holiday inn in Muskegon (via Google Maps), about halfway downstate and near the park. We loaded up the van, said goodbye to our hosts in Petosky, and hit the road.
We rolled into a lovely Holiday Inn, Sweetie and the stuff stayed there, and the kids and I went off to the park. It was so nice to be in a hotel with a pool and permission to be boisterous.
Michigan’s Adventure was way more park that we could address in one day. The water park was great, but needed hot tubs to warm up. Gotta have hot tubs. Once we were too cold, we changed out and started to ride the rides. Short rides, but that means short lines.
So, we went back to the hotel, damp and tired.
The next day, we realized that across the road from us was a restored WWII landing craft: the Landing Ship Tanks (LST) 393. I demanded we stop and check it out. The adults were down with this, but the kids had to be dragged along. Still, when they read about WWII and D-Day, they will have a frame of reference. We stood in those hot, close spaces, and I asked them to imagine the 18 year old boys who stayed in those hot spaces, knowing that they were on their way to likely death. It felt immense, but this was a small ship!
After this, it was on the road to Chicago.