Visiting Universities on the Last Day

Sunday, May 24, 2015--Battle Creek to Detroit via Lansing and Ann Arbor

We were interested in seeing both Lansing and Ann Arbor mainly because of the two major university campuses, but also to explore their downtowns.  Lansing surprised us by having a rather plain downtown with little happening there.  The Capitol was undergoing restoration on its dome and was closed for the Memorial Day weekend.  We walked the streets, but found nothing much of interest .

The campus of Michigan State University is away from the downtown area.  They have a beautiful campus with lots of open green spaces.  It was rather quiet, but some people were around.  Unfortunately, the buildings were closed because of the holiday weekend, I guess.  We drove up and down the streets through the campus seeing the massive buildings that seldom had any special architectural charm.  As I stated above, it is the green spaces that make the campus pretty.  We stopped at a park and ate a picnic lunch in the car, since there were no picnic tables in any of the green spaces we saw.  We would have liked to have had an ice cream cone at the Student Center from the shop operated by the campus dairy farm, but the building was closed even though their literature said it is open on Sundays.

Ann Arbor was more interesting.  The campus and the downtown area have grown together.  There were crowds on the streets and on the campus.  We wandered around watching people and looking at the buildings.  The Law School Quadrangle on campus was especially beautiful mainly because of the architecture of the old stone buildings.  The campus had prettier buildings than the campus at Michigan State, but their campus lacked the open green spaces that Michigan State had and that would have made it more attractive.  Downtown, we searched for Fairy Doors--small doors for gnomes that businesses have made in a campaign to have something interesting downtown.  Unfortunately, the campaign has not been highly successful, so we really had to search; finally, we came across about 4 of the doors.

Monday, May 25, 2015--Back to San Antonio

Our flight was at 6:05, and we had to return our rental car.  Therefore, we set the alarm for 3:30--UGHHHH!  Everything went smoothly, though.  We made it into San Antonio around 11:00.  That brought us back to reality.  Wes had to leave for Corpus, since he had a class scheduled to begin Tuesday morning.  I had to start dealing with both my new and old homes again and had to start studying for an exam on Friday to become a Certified Tourist Ambassador.  Life goes on.....