Grand Rapids

We kicked off the holiday weekend and our Spring/Summer of travel with a 2.5 drive west to Grand Rapids en route to the Leelanau Peninsula, Suttons Bay, and Leland area for some hiking, wine tasting, and "Pure Michigan" sunsets!  Instead of following all the other Michiganders up Interstate 75 (the most popular and congested path to going "up north" Michigan), we thought we spend an evening in Grand Rapids going west before heading north.  This allowed us to actually spend some time in Grand Rapids during the warmer months of the year rather than always in the winter for the Michigan Brewer's Guild Winter Beer Festival!

One of the other factors that led us to make a quick stop in Grand Rapids was that we could get a pretty decent rate at the JW Marriott downtown thanks to Scottie's Marriott status.  Second to the night we got engaged (staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Denver!), this was one of the nicest hotels we've stayed at.  I definitely reminded Scottie that we need to keep staying in these types of hotels as we continue our travels, and he just shakes his head.

After we settled in, Scottie and I, took a stroll around the city admiring the mix of restaurants and bars along with the cleanliness of the city and relative centralization of all the activity, buildings, etc.  We wish we could take Grand Rapids and place it inside Detroit.

Our walk concluded at Bistro Bella Vita, a restaurant recommended by our friend, Steve, where we enjoyed a relaxing, delicious Italian dinner while conveniently catching Game 6 of the Boston Celtics - Orlando Magic basketball playoff match-up.  Their menu offered a lot of healthy selections as well as some specialties (e.g. gnocchi!).  Our meal doubled as a nice base coat for the next part of our Grand Rapids tour as we headed to two of our favorite breweries/brew pubs from the Michigan Brewer's Guild festivals: Hopcat and Founder's Brewing Company.

At Hopcat, we met a new friend (or at least that's what we like to call him), Jake, who was our bartender for the evening and guided us through their extensive beer list (I should also point out the sound advice he provided on some of the activities we had in store for the Leelanau Peninsula as well).  Instead of going with our customary beer "sampler", Jake let us sample away at the beers and actually encouraged it before we ordered a full pint of any of the beers.  While the samplers did cost a less than the pints, we're pretty sure the ratio of samplers consumed to samplers charged on our bill was definitely in our favor!  We managed to turn our attention away from the beer list, so we could walk up to Founder's to finally see what their taproom looked like.

At Founder's, we reverted back to our standard ways by ordering up a nice sampler with the beers that they had on tap, which included: Pale Ale, IPA, Honey Wheat, Porter, Oatmeal Stout, and Endurance Ale.  We also ended up consuming a pint of the Imperial Stout.  But we decided the atmosphere, not to mention the friendly staff, over at Hopcat was more our speed, so we capped off the evening over there.

The next day, we headed over to San Chez Bistro for brunch (yummy omelets!) and then hit the road up north.  Someday we'll actually go into the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum!

More pictures from Grand Rapids in my photo album.