Day Two in Grand Haven!

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 135 - August 13, 2017

We had a leisurely morning, and a great breakfast of blueberry pancakes and bacon! Then, when Patty went for her shower, I got a bug up my behind, as I sometimes do, and decided we needed to clean and sanitize the cooler, which led to defrosting the freezer! While the freezer was defrosting, we tackled cleaning the vinyl on the camperback windows - all nine of them! The bugs yielded grudgingly to my vinegar - water cleaning solution and the terrycloth towels, but they sure look a lot better now. This pretty much accounted for our morning through lunch!

We went for the Grand Haven Trolley Tour right after lunch. This is one of the best values we have encountered anywhere so far, only $0.75 for seniors, with unlimited on-off privileges - but we didn't get off, we just enjoyed the tour! The trolley picked us up out in front of the Chinook Pier shopping area.

Grand Haven Trolley

Our trolley driver took us all around Grand Haven, and told us about what we were seeing along the way, interspersed with typical trolley tour corny jokes! It was really very entertaining! At every red light, she would play the Jeopardy theme and give us quiz questions and people would shout out guesses. When the light turned green, we would get the answers. Examples: "When was Grand Haven founded?", "What is the population of Grand Haven?" Answers: 1835 and 10,911. Some of the most interesting things were certain small homes owned originally by workers at the local tannery. They were Sears and Roebuck kit homes that were available in the catalog between 1908 and 1940, and sold for $744 to over $2,000 depending on size. An inventory of Grand Haven buildings identifies the Sears home at 1340 Franklin Street as having been purchased in 1923. The kits would be delivered by rail to Grand Haven, and then assembled by the purchaser! Because these houses came in 12,000-piece kits and were shipped by rail (in a single boxcar), they usually landed within 1-2 miles of rail lines. The garage was not included but was a $50 extra! The tour was a lot of fun, and a whole lot less expensive than the commercial tours we have taken in other cities! 

Our trolley driver / tour guide for the Grand Haven Trolley Tour!

The tour returned us to the Chinook Pier, where we enjoyed a cup of ice cream, which was not quite up to the standard of the Traverse City ice cream we had on Saturday at Kilwins. I think we are becoming ice cream snobs!

We came back to the boat, got our bikes, and pedaled back downtown to Washington Street for some more shopping! Our first stop was the Baker's Wife, where we got a loaf of walnut - cranberry bread that had been recommended to us and a couple of cranberry - pecan muffins. We had Googled for a liquor store and the only hit downtown was Fontinos, which was described as a candy store. We asked the lady at the Baker's Wife where a liquor store was, and she told us Fontinos had candy on one side and liquor on the other! As it turned out, they also had a very limited supply of other food items, so we got our gin, my Evan Williams (kind of missing Forty Creek Canadian whiskey though), and some butter. Our final stop was at Grand Haven Vinegar and Oil. We sampled their balsamic and Tuscan olive oil mixture, which was great, but we opted to only buy a bottle of the balsamic vinegar. There is no grocery store close in or close to downtown Grand Haven, but with the Farmers Market yesterday, and the stores downtown today, we were able to get the things we really wanted!

After sundowners on the cockpit, we pedaled our bikes back downtown again. We had decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner out, and after checking the menus of a few local places, we chose the Kirby Grille on Washington.

Our bikes parked in front of the Kirby Grille.
We are doing a lot of biking here!

At the Kirby Grille at their sidewalk seating

Dinner was very good!

After dinner, we came back, and decided to extend our stay in Grand Haven for one more night! We now have three more stops on Lake Michigan before making the crossing to Chicago to start the inland rivers portion of our Loop!