New Years Day - 2015's First Road Trip

My Beloved and I are big on road trips.  There are just so many opportunities to find places you would have never thought to visit, little gems like The Hermitage or The Lane Motor Museum or The Museum of Appalachia or even The International Towing & Recovery Museum.  And do you know what I lovedy, love, love about my Beloved? He will stand there and read all the plaques with me, listen to the guides and even if it ain't his thang he doesn't get impatient and try to rush us along.

He is an awesome road trip buddy.

Every New Year's Day we pack up some sandwiches & sodas, fill a couple of water bottles and our coffee cups, grab a bag of chips and a map book and hit the open roads to be touristy in our own state.  We only take the back roads and the two lane highways heading in a predetermined direction or taking a certain road.

One year we took Grand River from our house all the way across the state to Grand Rapids, another year we decided to head up to the tippy top of the "thumb" where we saw the Pointe Aux Barques lighthouse, Grindstone City and Port Hope.  One year we drove up to Traverse City despite blizzard warnings,

This year I got a hankerin' to take Michigan Avenue (US 12) across the state to where it ended at the Michigan state line in New Buffalo - it starts at Campus Martius in downtown Detroit and ends in Washington state (!) - I didn't want to drive down to Detroit to start there because I felt it would take up too much of our morning and we were getting a late start as it was.

As is tradition I fried up a pound of bacon and we had a whole mountain of scrambled eggs (instead of french toast) before we headed out.

Road Trip Essentials: A camera, a map book and your besty

Ready for a million picture pictorial review of our day? Good, 'cause I'm giving you one.

Chelsea, MI - Home of Jiffy Mix
Relatively close to home & our first encounter with Michigan Ave. 

Muuuuch of our drive looked like this: farms/farmhouses and fields
*You can tell how old a farmhouse is by its proximity to the road!

Bronson, MI - Where they get purple street signs with Vikings on them.
Also, where US 12 is called Chicago St.

Our sister street!

Interrupting the pictorial for a history lesson:
My mom always used to tell us that our grandmother proclaimed that her children (eight of them) were going to send her to the poorhouse - I'm not going to go into detail about poorhouses but you can Google the term and read about them.  Fascinating stuff! Anyway, Poor farms were poorhouses, subsidized by the county's government, on farm land where the able bodied had to help to take care of themselves and the other poor/disabled who lived there.  The poor farm for the county that I live in was across the street from our house, hence the name County Farm Rd.

St. Joseph County Michigan - Poorhouse/farm.
(credit)

And here it is today

Sturgis, MI

I wish I had gotten a picture from the front
but I didn't know I would find an awesome historic one

I wonder what this is for!?

The one and only historical marker we stopped at (?)

See? He gets out of the car to read the signs!
Which shamed me enough to actually get out of the car

One of the original pylons 

We made it!

We made it to Michigan/Indiana border and had lunch in New Buffalo, MI where my hubby went to truck driving school.  Afterward we decided to drive up the Lake Michigan coast and wander toward home.

I think that the Great Lakes are incredibly beautiful

Pure Michigan

See what I mean?

And as the sun was setting I didn't get any more pictures after this.  Except this one as we were in line waiting for our Taco Bell dinner.

I stole his hat and was wearing it at a jaunty angle