August 2026: A Great Lakes Summer Road Trip: Day 6

Day 6: Wednesday August 12, 2026

Even though we were now a solid half hour closer to today’s first destination than we’d originally planned, we still woke up pretty early today after the best night’s sleep of the trip so far. We both agreed that the bed here was REALLY comfortable. And let’s face it, after yesterday’s excitement, we’d been pretty exhausted.

We got up and got ready and headed down to breakfast. Despite Tru being one of Hilton’s budget brands, the breakfast spread was solid. I had a bagel. Nick had pancakes from a machine that you put your plate under, waved your hand, and it deposited mini pancakes on your plate. He immediately wanted to stay at a Tru whenever possible in the future.

Breakfast eaten, we rounded everything up and Nick loaded up the car while I prepped bags of ice for the cooler. Need to keep the candy from melting! We checked out and were on the road between 7 and 8.

The drive north was uneventful, and most of it was through relatively rural areas, which was a nice change of pace. As an added bonus, today the weather was beautiful!

We made it to our lunch stop, Shipwreck Cafe, in Empire, MI, shortly before noon. This is a small sandwich shop. I had a sandwich that had turkey, havarti, cucumber, bacon and garlic mayo on a pretzel roll. Nick had a sandwich that had roast beef, cheese and horseradish on a pretzel roll. The pretzel rolls were more like soft pretzel sub rolls, which were fantastic and we both agreed that these sandwiches were some of the best we’ve ever had. If you’re ever passing through Empire, MI and you like a good sandwich, go to the Shipwreck Cafe!

Lunch eaten, we drove just a couple minutes around the corner to the visitor center for Sleeping Bear Dunes. Here we got the park map and took a few minutes to learn about the area, before we headed out for the main attraction.

The trip over to the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive from the visitor center was about 10 minutes. Once here, we stopped at just a couple of view points, and the drive itself didn’t take all that long, but it was well worth it. These dunes are pretty mind blowing, and I totally understand why people are fined significant amounts of money if they go down to the water and can’t make the climb up the dunes. Bottom line, Sleeping Bear Dunes was well worth the stop on this road trip. We both enjoyed it.

From here we drove about 10 more minutes to a stop that was all for Nick: Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor, MI. Cherry Republic is a store of all cherry stuff…sauces, sodas, candies, queso. However, they’ve created their own little campus, essentially. On this campus are a wine tasting room, restaurant, beer garden, pie food truck, ice cream truck and pit spitting field. It was a unique place to visit. Nick did some shopping, got some ice cream, and we split a wine tasting. I don’t particularly like cherries, but we both enjoyed the wines enough to bring some home.

 
Nick’s wallet significantly lighter, we piled back into the car and made the 45ish minute drive to our next hotel, the Mitchell Creek Inn in Traverse City. Here, we checked in and settled in for a bit. This was an older but clean motel.

 
After settling in, we headed for dinner at Sleder’s. It’s the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Michigan, so it was a natural choice. It was about a 10 minute drive from the hotel and easy enough to find with the help of good old Google Maps.

Dinner here was very good. I had an apple blueberry cider and an excellent grilled chicken sandwich. Nick had a stout, I think, and fried shrimp (in Michigan?!). We split fried cheese curds as an appetizer. Food was good, service was good, beverages were good. We’d have no hesitation eating here again if we were in the area.

 
Once we finished dinner, we headed for another natural spot for us…ice cream! I’d seen Moomers mentioned a lot as a Traverse City institution, so obviously we had to go there. And…it lived up to the hype. Nick had some sort of cherry ice cream and he definitely had a moment eating it. I had raspberry white chocolate ice cream and loved mine too.

Ice cream consumed, it was time for one more stop for Nick. It was a short drive to Traverse City Whiskey and after parking, we headed inside, where we found a great bar/lounge set-up. We ended up splitting the cakeless fruitcake flight, plus Nick got an additional pour of a more standard whiskey. They had surprisingly decent whiskeys, so Nick ended up buying a few bottles after we had enjoyed our time sitting at the bar.

 
We then headed back to the hotel, where Nick chilled and I took a quick walk across the street to Lake Michigan. It was a pretty night. I also stopped in a tourist store on the way back to the hotel, but didn’t buy anything.

 
Back at the hotel, I think we crashed relatively early, and we slept better than we expected, given that they’d put us in the very end room, closest to the road.

August 2026: A Great Lakes Summer Road Trip: Day 5

Day 5: Tuesday August 11, 2026

Today started with me stalking weather forecasts, trying to determine the correct plan for the day. The original plan for today was to drive to Indiana, explore Indiana Dunes National park and also visit the Albanese Candy Factory Outlet. There were some thunderstorms in the forecast. Because I’d been doing facebook check-ins at some places in western Ohio, some regional amateur weather people were starting to appear on my facebook. They were calling for some serious weather. But I know that in New England, we have some of these too. Some we trust. Some we do not. I didn’t know if these were in the trust category or the sensationalist category. So I stalked the official forecasts, with some ideas in mind, including completely diverting if the official forecasts looked that bad.

Because the official forecasts were calling for approximately an hour of thunderstorms, “some strong”, in the middle of the day, I made the decision to more or less continue with our plans. There were NO severe weather watches or warnings posted for the area we were traveling to the morning of. We would start at the Indiana Dunes visitor center, do what we could within the park, head to Albanese for indoor candy shopping while the storms went through, and then when things cleared, we would walk the Dunes Succession trail back at the national park. And then we would spend the night near-ish the park.

Plan made, we headed downstairs to breakfast. We both were immediately impressed with the free breakfast at Home2. This was our first stay at a Home2 Suites, but we would stay at one again without hesitation.

After breakfast we headed back to the room, where I checked the weather again. There were still no severe weather watches posted, so we rounded up our stuff and headed out. I checked out, Nick loaded the car, and we were on our way to Indiana.

The drive was uneventful and even interesting at times. We drove past lots of warehouses for companies I’ve heard of that I definitely did not know were in Indiana, like Tire Rack. We also determined that Indiana and I do not agree about speed limit philosophies.

 
Eventually we made it to the visitor at Indiana Dunes National Park. This was a pretty lackluster visitor center, but we took the requisite pictures, bought the requisite souvenirs and got the maps. I checked the weather again. We headed first to the Progress Houses from a Worlds Fair in the 1930s I believe. These were more fascinating than I expected.

Since thunder was starting to rumble, we hopped in the car and headed for Albanese Candy Factory, planning to come back to the park once the storm front had passed through. This drive turned out to be anything but uneventful.

As we drove along I-94, the clouds got significantly darker and the wind started picking up. As we closed in on the off-ramp, the rain started. As we entered the top of the off-ramp, the rain became so heavy that we couldn’t see. No one could. The highway stopped. Because we were on an off-ramp, we were able to maneuver enough to not be directly next to a tractor trailer (the wind was STRONG) and to be in front of a stopped tractor trailer, to avoid being rear-ended by another blind driver. We then sat here for at least 15 minutes, in a shaking car because of the wind, with my phone GPS going to night mode because it got so dark outside, and with both of our phones blasting, warning us about life threatening conditions. But no worries…there had been no severe weather watches a couple hours earlier🙄.

When the rain let up enough that it was possible to see, we continued down the off-ramp and found ourselves in a totally different world. Street lights were out, trees were down, intersections were flooded. It should have been a few miles and a few minutes to Albanese (which at this point we were trying to get to just so we could have a safe parking lot to figure out our next steps), but it actually took close to 45 minutes, because every road the GPS tried to direct us down was blocked by fallen trees or flooding, or both. We drove through neighborhoods where every house had a tree on it. It was like the apocalypse happened right here in Indiana.

We did make it to Albanese eventually, after navigating downed trees and fording a small river or two. They had power (realistically from generators) so we went inside, where kids were happily running around and the employees had no clue about the reality outside. We bought candy and re-grouped before getting back into the car.

 
Back in the car, we worked our way to the interstate. This was a slow process, because all the traffic lights were out. Totally understandable. We snacked on road trip snacks and just tried to process the last couple of hours. As we crawled towards an intersection that was at the entrance to a mall of sorts, my tire pressure light came on. So I pulled into the mall parking lot to take a look. At this point, all my tires looked fine, so we chalked it up to Nick having been shifting things around in the car immediately before that. Our little detour helped us though. We were able to use a mall exit further down the parking lot to avoid a couple of intersections.

Eventually we made it to the highway. Here we found more storm debris, one interchange that was completely stopped (we later found out this was because tractor trailers had tipped over on the other highway) and eventually what seemed like progress. Since we had to go past Indiana Dunes to get to our motel for the night, we headed back towards the park. We were able to get to the Portage Riverwalk, so we stopped there to take in the views. We weren’t the only ones either.

 
After taking in some views, we headed back to the car, where it was clearer exactly which tire was causing the tire pressure light to come on. And of course the tire inflator was sitting in the garage at home. Crap.

We continued on, past many blocked entrances to virtually all other parts of the national park and closed gas stations because of lack of power. We did eventually find a gas station with power about a mile from our motel. We were able to fill the tire up here, but we could hear hissing as we filled it, so we knew there was a problem.

Eventually we found our motel, Al & Sally’s. It was too early to check in, but this at least gave us a known address parking lot to make a plan. This also allowed us to see that the motel actually had power. We ruled out calling AAA, knowing they’d be responding to cars with trees on them right now, and did some googling. A WalMart was a couple miles away, so we decided to see if we could get there.

We made it to a main drag, and surprisingly there was power. Shortly before the turn for WalMart, we found a tire store, so we went there instead. They checked my tire and determined it could not be repaired, having found a significant hole (presumably from storm damage), so after a bit of thought, we decided on Michelin Climate something something tires and agreed to replacing all 4, since we’d been planning to replace all 4 in October anyway.

While the tire guys changed my tires out, we walked a couple storefronts down to Chik-fil-A for the first actual meal we had had since breakfast. I think we both got chicken tenders. While here, we both agreed that we should get the heck out of Indiana. I did a bit of research and found a place to book with my Hilton points about 40 minutes away in Michigan, outside of the storm damage area. We got that booked, finished eating, and worked our way back to the tire store, where my car was ready. We retrieved the keys and got on the highway.

It was amazing driving out of there. Within 10 minutes of getting on the highway, we had left all storm damage behind. This drive was thankfully uneventful and within about 40 minutes of leaving the tire place, we arrived at our new hotel for the night, the Tru St Joseph in Stevensville, MI. Check-in here was quick, and when he heard why we had just barely booked this reservation, the grandfatherly man checking us in assigned us to a room on the 4th/top floor, facing the woods, so that “it’ll be nice and quiet for you two”. We liked this place already.

We headed up to our room where we settled in, ate candy, communicated with our people back home, read some storm reports, and eventually crashed for the night.

August 2026: A Great Lakes Road Trip: Day 4

Day 4: Monday August 10, 2026

This morning started with me stalking weather forecasts and we ended up having a slower start than anticipated, thanks to quite a storm rolling across Lake Erie about 7:30 am. It was pretty wild to watch the lighthouse just disappear in the storm clouds.

While it stormed, we had a breakfast of road snacks and packed up. Once the storm started winding down, I filled bags with ice (I’d literally packed a couple boxes of different sized Ziploc bags, and these were a great thing to have with us) for the cooler. When the storm was really over, we hauled our stuff out to the car and checked out. Then it was off to the park for round 2.

We got to the park about 9:30, half an hour after early entry for hotel guests officially started. We wandered a bit, before Nick got into line for Top Thrill 2. This was a ride he had said yesterday he did not need to ride, but with ride closures plus early entry ride limitations, he decided to ride it anyway. I think he waited about 40 minutes. This ride is NUTS. I occupied my time waiting by getting the Coke Freestyle package for me for the day and social media-ing. Eventually he re-emerged, thoroughly impressed by this coaster.

 
We headed deeper into the park, where we took pictures and then Nick and I both rode Iron Dragon. This is probably Cedar Point’s version of a family coaster. It was totally doable for me. We also marveled over the fact that to evacuate one coaster, people would have to go down dozens of spiral staircases. That coaster wasn’t on my list anyway, but it really wasn’t after that. I HATE spiral staircases.

 
Then Nick saw that Millenium Force, which is apparently the original giga-coaster, whatever that means, was practically a walk on, so I held the stuff while he headed off to ride the giga-coaster.

Nick reappeared probably 10 minutes later, having enjoyed Millenium Force. He said his beard got pretty wild on that one. After that, we wandered through Frontier Town, me grateful that Disney’s Frontierland does not have live animals, unlike Cedar Point’s Frontier Town. This area was RANK. We also got the soda package for the day for Nick. This really is a solid deal. You get a wristband. At each soda station or quick service restaurant, they just scan your wristband and hand you a cup. That same cup of soda is $5+ if purchased individually. The soda package was about $23 with taxes. So 4-5 sodas and it’s paid for itself. Most stations had Freestyle machines.

After a decent break, Nick found his way to Steel Vengeance. This ended up being a MUCH longer wait than what was posted, but it also ended up being his favorite coaster at Cedar Point. He emerged grinning like a kid in a candy shop after that one.

By now it was time for some food, so we headed in the direction of Happy Friar, because who doesn’t like loaded fries?! We split whatever they were calling the fries that were dusted with bbq seasoning and then had pulled pork and bbq sauce on top. These were pretty good. They would have been better if they had had cheese sauce too, but they made a good lunch.

From here we could see that Gemini was actually running for basically the first time since we’d arrived in Sandusky, so while I cleaned up from lunch, Nick headed off to ride that. It was a short wait, and he emerged just as the ride shut down, with guests stuck partway along the track. He did not like this one. Something about male anatomy slapping against the coaster seat.

By now our time at Cedar Point was starting to wind down. We did a little shopping, discovering that there are embroidery kits for sale in the store check out lines for all of us stuff holding wives. We took our picture with a Snoopy statue for my Peanuts loving mother in law. We rode Blue Steel, which is a 1950s wooden roller coaster that I’m pretty sure re-aligned my brain. Nick decided he didn’t want to ride a coaster that had previously been on his list. 

We wandered the park a bit more and then Nick decided he wanted to ride Steel Vengeance once more time. So we made our way there, I took his stuff, and then I set off to find dole whip while he waited in line. I got pineapple strawberry swirl, and it made my day. Then I headed back to Steel Vengeance to wait for Nick, where the people watching was excellent. My personal favorite was the kid that was probably about 10 who admitted to his mom after exiting the ride that, while on the ride, he had “said the f word”. Considering it’s a wooden roller coaster (now on a steel track) that has corkscrews, I didn’t blame him in the least. Seemed like his mom didn’t either.

Nick emerged eventually and decided he had done all he needed to at Cedar Point. So after another soda stop (yes, we did get our money’s worth!) we made our way out of the park and back to the hotel parking lot.

Back at the car, we got organized for the drive, programmed the GPS, and headed out. It was about an hour and 20 minute, very easy drive to our next hotel, the Home2 Suites Perrysburg Levis Commons, a little south of Toledo.

Check in was easy, and after finding the parking lot, we quickly hauled our stuff in and settled in to room 306. We were very happy with this room.

 
Once settled in, we made dinner decisions and walked to dinner. Levis Commons is a business/shopping complex with stores, a movie theater, restaurants and other businesses. I hadn’t really realized this when booking, but really appreciated the convenience factor now.

A 3 minute walk brought us to Bar Louie, a chain we’d never been to, but that we would absolutely go back to. Dinner was great here. As an added bonus, their happy hour runs later than most so we were able to take full advantage of that. The big thing for their happy hour is $6 martinis and they have numerous “signature martinis”, most that are not typical. We’re not martini drinkers, but we had no issue finding inexpensive beverages to drink here. And they were legitimate cocktails. Our first round was a raspberry lemonade martini for me and an espresso martini for Nick. We also got the pretzel bite appetizer. I had a grilled chicken sandwich for dinner that had to be the most tender grilled chicken I’ve ever had. I don’t actually remember what Nick ate for dinner. For our second round of drinks, I had basically a margarita in a martini glass and Nick got the s’mores martini. Food and beverage were excellent and service was too. This was a great find, and being able to walk here from the hotel was wonderful.

After dinner we walked back to the hotel where we chilled, I stalked some weather forecasts and we crashed early.