One Day In Southwest Michigan
Bailey and I are currently in the RV capital of America to meet with the Coachmen team. Our original plan was to head to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a week following our stay here. However, we will be meeting friends for their vacation in Wisconsin and won’t be making it to Michigan for a stay until after June. We decided that since we had an open day on Sunday, we would make the trip up to Grand Rapids to get a taste of what we will see in a month or two.
St. Joseph, Michigan Lighthouse photograph taken by Liam Theo Creative on May 22, 2022
Grand Rapids is only an hour and 25 minutes away from our campsite with Kalamazoo in the middle. We stopped in Kalamazoo at Sam’s for gas before finishing our drive up. In true Bailey and Liam fashion, we were later than we wanted to be. It all worked out for us in the end however as you will see by the end of this post.
We didn’t have any sort of specific destination or part of town in mind prior, so we just put Grand Rapids in Google and like most cities and town, it took us to downtown. From there, we went for coffee, because who doesn’t love coffee, especially from a local shop? Bailey found a shop that was popular called Madcap Coffee. The shop was in a really awesome building and the interior had a really cool layout. They had 3 workers that were so in sync with each other and performed unlike any coffee shop I’ve seen before. Bailey got a nitro cold brew, because if there’s every nitro, you can bet she’ll order that. I ordered the coffee flight which featured a pour over, espresso shot, and an espresso blend. It also had sparkling water to cleanse the pallet.
From there we went for food. Being a Sunday, many places were closed or closing soon, so the friendly staff at Madcap recommended a brewery to us. The brewery was named Brewery Vivant and it was in a very cool and unique part of the city. We ordered the beer flight, because that’s the best way to experience a new brewery along with the duck nachos. All of it was incredible! The duck nachos were the perfect blend and the beers fit our tastes exquisitely.
I highly recommend you visit both of these Grand Rapids local spots if you’re ever in the area. This was the end of our time in Grand Rapids and I thought the end of our adventure for the day, but per usual, Bailey had a little something extra up here sleeve for us. She put coordinates in google for me to follow and I drove us there without a clue of where we were going.
Turns out, she knew exactly what we needed to finish off our time in Michigan…a trip to the Lake Michigan shore. Just before we reached Benton Harbor, Michigan, I began to notice signs that I’d only seen during visits to other areas with Great Lakes. Also, I noticed on the GPS that we were near a large body of water. Once we arrived in Benton Harbor, we noticed a ton of signage for PGA and the golf course had some unique set ups. Turns out, the PGA Senior Championships are there this upcoming weekend. We are much for golf, so that didn’t interest us too much, we had our sites on a park that would take us to the Lake Michigan shore.
We first stopped at Jean Klock Park for a good quality beach experience. So, do you remember earlier in this post how I said everything worked out for us being later than we initially planned? Well, this is where that truly benefitted us. We ended up at the beach at the perfect time. The sun was beginning to set, there was nobody around, and the temperature was perfect. The only thing left to do was go get some pictures at the lighthouse just a little further down the shoreline.
In the past, Bailey and I had spent a lot of effort and time attempting to find good quality chances at photographing lighthouse with far less success than I had hoped. However this time, without trying to hard, we succeeded and with a beautiful sunset to add to it. Just take a look at the photographs below of our day in Western Michigan to see how well it went!
