R and J in the USA

Our original plans for Michigan entailed five days to visit the various sites of the state and two days to hang out for Julie’s birthday. Since we were dragging significantly behind schedule on both itinerary planning and the blog, we added an entire week to Michigan for a Blog and Itinerary Bootcamp.

As is the case in any state, there were plenty more sights and places we wanted to see than we could fit into the time we had for them. 

On our first day in the Wolverine State, we drove through Ann Arbor to see where the Wolverines gather. We did a drive-by of the University of Michigan. Ryan thought it would be neat to see the stadium with that giant golden M proudly displayed. It was. We got some great pictures of it and would see those golden “M”s throughout Michigan. Julie came into the trip knowing fairly little about college football, but, between a visit to Ohio and then to Michigan, she got a pretty good education on things you do and don’t say when in each state.

We made our way over to Lansing to check out Michigan’s state capitol building. We were impressed, as we’ve come to be with each state’s capitol. When we first started the trip, we simply thought visiting the state capitol buildings would give us a neat thing to see, but we’d already begun to find it an invaluable way of getting to know a state and getting a sense of what it’s all about. The history, the culture, the civics, not to mention the often jaw dropping architecture. Like a handful of other state capitol buildings we’d visited, we learned about how proud and dedicated to building their capitol on budget Michigan was. It was neat to learn that here in Michigan is where the architectural idea of a domed capitol building found its place in American iconography.