We had one road trip planned for our week vacation and that was heading to Charlevoix and Petoskey. Once again, we slept in, ate a later breakfast, got ready and hit the road at about 11:00.
On our way to the Castle in Charlevoix, we stopped at a local store and all picked out a fun snack so we could have a picnic. The Castle is beautiful with fabulous gardens. We really did enjoy a picnic before starting our tour.
The boys got to feed the fish - the fish would jump out of the water to get the food - it was pretty cool.
My silly boys after our picnic - they were running around on the little bridges.
The main reason I chose the Castle as a place to visit was because it has a HUGE train set. Like the miniature trains but there are miles and miles of tracks. My little engineers loved them. We probably spent over an hour just exploring and watching the trains. There was also a maze for the kids to go through and an ABC garden. To be honest, Darryl and I didn't explore the Castle itself at all - we just focused on the kids stuff and we were still there a good 3 hours. We want to go back without kids to actually walk through the whole thing.
We ended with a walk through the enchanted forest but we were all hot and tired so it wasn't so enchanted - just muggy and buggy :-)
On our way back towards Mackinaw City, we stopped at Bill's Farm Market. Bill is my dad's cousin so it was neat to meet a family member that I had only heard of in the past.
Finally, on our way home, we stopped at Leg's Inn. It is a Polish Restaurant that we ate at almost 12 years ago at the tail end of the McMaster family reunion. Both Darryl and I had a better memory of this place then we actually experienced and honestly, won't go back.
Once we got back to the hotel, we headed to the swimming pool. While out, we had picked up the arm blow-up swimmy things for the boys because Nate really wanted to swim on his own. Well, swim he did! These were common phrases while in the pool, "Mom, don't touch me.", "Mom, don't hold on to me", Mom, move away from me right now" hahahaha Those $1.00 arm things made him float and he didn't even care if he tipped and got his face in the water. Now, Josh . . .when we left the pool an hour later we had finally gotten him to only hang onto Darryl's thumbs . . instead of a death grip on his neck :-/ The best words of the night from Nate? "Look mom, I CAN swim!!!" We headed back to the room and yes, the boys got to stay up late once again.
