My birthday present to Todd was to plan a weekend-long getaway for just the two of us to a surprise location. So Todd knew we were going, but didn't know where! Mom and Dad helped with this plan by taking care of Nathan for the weekend, and even met us part of the way on Friday night to pick him up so that we could save an hour in our drive time!
Our destination was the cute town of Holland, MI which is a hair over an hour's drive from Kalamazoo, and right near Lake Michigan. The town happens to be the home of Kalamazoo College's rival, Hope College, but once you let go of that, it's a great place! :)
We stayed at the very cool City Flats Hotel, which is located right downtown. It's a pretty new facility, very modern decor and each room is different.
After sleeping in on Saturday (such a luxury!) we headed to a local Dutch bakery, deBoer's, for breakfast. As advertised, and reviewed online, it was delicious!! Busy, but worth the wait.
After breakfast we wandered through the Holland Farmer's Market (it's great, probably out of this world at the height of summer when all the fruits and veggies are in season) and spent the rest of the morning poking around the little shops all along 8th Street downtown. The shopping worked up an appetite, so we decided to stop at Kilwin's for a nutritious lunch of ice cream!
What is the perfect follow-up to ice cream for lunch, you may wonder? Well, I have your answer--a brewery tour! We headed over to New Holland's brewery headquarters and took a tour. It was interesting, and the samples were plentiful (no, don't worry, I didn't drink them--Todd graciously had my share as well as his!) but I have to say that all of our distillery tours in Kentucky set the bar extremely high, and New Holland fell short. I got the impression that they haven't been offering tours for very long, and it seemed pretty amateur. But, again, beer samples, and we got to take home pint glasses, which was pretty cool.
After the tour we headed back to the hotel and took a nap (another luxury!) then went to dinner at CityVu, located on the top floor of our hotel, and even went to see a movie (Bridesmaids). The next morning we slept in a bit, had breakfast at a great little greasy spoon diner called The Windmill, and headed back to my parents' house to pick up Nathan.
All in all it was a fantastic and relaxing weekend!
1 comment:
It sounds delightful!!
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