I always wanted to go to Michigan. Now I have. And now I only have North Dakota left before I can brag about visiting all 50 states!
When I travel outside the U.S., I am often delighted to wander into a place I did not know existed. Once there, I am often even more delighted to experience something that gives me deeper insight into the culture I’m visiting and the character of its people. I travelled like that in the U.S. this time and it was revealing.
As we compared our trip to Michigan to trips in other countries, we kept saying, “The U.S. is rich!” We’re so rich we can afford to be excessive, and we are.
So beyond the charming people we met along the way, the helpful guides, the winsome (really!) fast-food servers, and our good friends, I want to highlight the fascinating excesses we discovered along the way.
Cleveland — The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
I rolled into Cleveland and managed to find our hotel and find parking. I got to the desk and dug out my confirmation when they had trouble finding my booking. I was at the wrong hotel! “You’d be surprised how often people do that!” the nice clerk said.
Just down the street on the waterfront (a short walk from our actual hotel) was the beautiful Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building, an excessive tribute to Boomer music right on the spot where “rock and roll” was invented to name the new art form. I loved it, since I am smack dab in the middle of the Boomer demographic and I was right down to the real nitty gritty in Cleveland.
Dearborn — Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village
Outside of Detroit (in Michigan!) is a museum complex we went to because someone heard we were going to Detroit and said we should go. We’d never heard of it. It is a huge tribute to Henry Ford that Henry Ford started himself.
To make his new faux settlement, Greenfield Village, Ford moved the schoolhouse of his youth to the site and replicated his childhood home meticulously. The village is a giant dollhouse for an exceedingly rich guy to play with. He preserved artifacts or replicated those of his heroes too. He has Noah Webster’s actual house, moved from Connecticut — he’s the entrepreneur who created American English with his dictionary (1828) and then sold books to teach it. There are a lot of Thomas Edison’s original workshops, too, since he was a real-life hero of Ford’s.
The Museum of American Innovation is enormous, big enough to house 260 vehicles from the earliest to the latest models, not to mention Teddy Roosevelt’s buggy and the car in which JFK was riding through Dallas. I thought the Louvre was a bit much, but the sheer excess of this exhausted me even more.
Indian River — Cross in the Woods Catholic Shrine
I did not realize that the Michigan Shore of Lake Michigan is essentially a Cote d’Azur where I least expected it. Anywhere there is a coast, it seems, Americans turn it into a cute replica of a scene from Carousel. We bought designer chocolates.
Our friends invited us to pilgrimage to the nearby site of the largest crucifix in the world, since they got the idea we do such things. (We’ve been to Chartres Cathedral twice, after all!). When I saw this cross, I was speechless. I asked how this got built and was told a priest thought Northern Michigan needed a place for Catholics to visit. Sounds like how most of the cathedrals in Europe were built.
Just as excessive, was the newly refurbished doll museum at the shrine, which the cashier said we should not miss. She was right. It might be in the top ten of the weirdest museums I’ve ever visited. Dolls and mannequins of all sizes were dressed in the habits of traditional monks and nuns, mainly pre-1970, the Boomer childhood. I doubt any order was missed. I marveled at the absurd, excessive dedication to minutia and irrelevance in documenting this recently-bygone era. It was a bit like Henry Ford immortalizing his childhood.
Frankenmuth — Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland
I wanted to stop in Frankenmuth on the way up because it was advertised on billboards as the location of Bronner’s, the largest Christmas store in the world. I stopped at Bronner’s for the same reason I go to South of the Border when driving to Florida and Wall Drug in South Dakota (and now Buc-ees whenever I see one). I made sure I got there on the way back — just as Michigan experienced the heat dome.
They were not kidding. It is large. This might be the Protestant answer to the largest crucifix. (CHRIST is intentionally advertised in their name and there is a church in the store). Christmas music my mother would recognize was playing. We wandered. The store is 2.2 acres, almost two football fields. We queasily passed through all of it. I usually like little ornament stores, but the sheer excess and kitsch of this one was overwhelming.
The wedding of Christ and capitalism at Christmas has always been a thing with me. My mother aspired to a Bronner’s-like house that I helped her concoct for the holiday, even though she was not a Christian in any noticeable way. When I became one, I disappointed her by insisting the day belonged to Jesus and I would not do it anymore. I think Bronner’s gave me flashbacks in troubling and good ways. I didn’t buy anything.
This brief sojourn in the Midwest mostly had to take place on Interstates. Interstate 75, for instance, is a top-notch road through the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan. My Itchy Boots motorcycle YouTube fav was recently in Bissau-Guinea which provides a sharp contrast. My main lesson remains, “Americans are a rich people and our excesses show it.” And often their Christianity reflects it.
It is amazing that so many beautiful people sprout from under that excess, like when all those ferns appear from under the leaves in the Poconos each spring. I know I don’t sound appreciative of all the art and ingenuity represented in my stops. I am not sure it was all well-used. But you’ve got to love it. I suspect Jesus does — he loves every drop of creativity in creation, doesn’t he? Even that colossal angel trumpeting over my head in the picture above took some God-given imagination.