The Roommate Triangle, part 2

Since I ended up devising the itinerary, I got to decide what/how much stuff we did. I’m not usually the one who plans these kinds of things, but I’ve found, based on my extensive travels¹, that having one main activity per day keeps things structured without making them hectic. That way you avoid the back and forth “I don’t know, what do you want to do,” but you’re not spending your days sprinting through the museum so you finish in time for your lunch reservations followed by a boat tour after which you’re meeting friends for dinner, and anything else you see besides that one thing is a nice bonus.

Train

That said, our activity for day two was the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. I ended up buying a membership because it paid for itself in a single visit. [As adults going to both the museum and village from open to close, you get your money’s worth pretty quickly. When I returned later with families with young kids who are interested in about three things and are ready to leave after a few hours, I realized that’s less the case. Your mileage may vary.] We started outdoors in Greenfield Village when it was just hot and humid as opposed to very hot and very humid. We made the rounds through the farm and craftworks where we heard about cooking, wheat harvesting, pottery, tin, printing, and glassblowing. By that time, we were ready for lunch, so we headed over to A Taste of History, which serves a variety of historically inspired foods ranging from sandwiches and soups to baked potatoes and pork pie. The cost is about what I’d expect for museum food (~$10), but I appreciate that it tastes like actual food and isn’t over-seasoned. After lunch, we got frozen custard and walked by most of the houses we hadn’t seen yet before heading inside to the museum.

Pottery workshop

Tin shop

The first exhibit we went to see was the temporary Star Trek exhibit. They had a bunch of the costumes, props, tie-in products, sets, scripts, and spaceships from everything from the original series [retronym-ed to The Original Series (TOS)] to Discovery. There were tribbles, phasers, communicators, the bridge (it’s literally a bunch of flashing lights). I’ve only seen about half of the first season of TOS and a couple of the movies, but I’m familiar with most of the characters, so I thought it was pretty cool.

Star Trek exhibit

We then saw some of the rest of the museum, including all the planes, trains, and automobiles, plus tractors, Henry Ford’s violins, and stoves, before people started getting tired. We returned to Ann Arbor for dinner at HopCat, the first restaurant I ever ate at in Ann Arbor. They serve pretty standard bar food, but their fries are above average and their beer list, the reason we were there, is ridiculous. They have somewhere around a hundred beers on tap, including lagers, ales, pilsners, IPAs, porters, stouts, sours, ciders, and miscellaneous. I don’t actually know what most of those are, but the point is that they have a lot of options. I ended up having a beer from the Wolverine State Brewing Co, who are based in Ann Arbor. I didn’t hate it, and it tasted like beer. We ended day 2 with more Star Trek – the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” featuring dilithium crystals, parallel universes, and evil Kirk.

¹To such exotic places as New England (as opposed to Old England), Canada, Holland², Ithaca², Plymouth², and Disney World.

²That would be Holland, Michigan; Ithaca, New York; and Plymouth (Plimoth) Plantation, Massachusetts or Plymoth, Michigan, respectively.