Road tripping to Southgate, Michigan…
Michigan Roadside Attractions
Apparently Michigan is in the Eastern time zone. In retrospect I probably already knew that but it never occurred to me to even check. Luckily, I was alerted to this fact the night before I went on my road trip to Southgate, Michigan, and, therefore, made it in plenty of time to watch the calamari eating contest!
I woke up at 6am Saturday and was at the Starbucks on the corner by 7. I needed coffee to keep me going. What really is funny to me is that driving the 2 hours to Champaign used to feel like forever and a day but now driving for 6 hours in one go feels like absolutely nothing. Without any stops Southgate would have only been about a four and a half hour drive. But you know me, I can’t drive anywhere without making a few stops. I had my heart set on finding some great Michigan roadside attractions.
My first stop was to be the World’s Largest nose in Grand Beach, Michigan. Unfortunately I got there at about 9:10am and the place it was at didn’t open until 10am. I didn’t have the time to dally about so I decided to leave it behind. Ah, next time. Luckily just down the road was an ice cream shop with a few cows and a giant ice cream cone! Totally unexpected, it’s always fun to run into giant cows!
Most of my afternoon drive was spent stopping at Big Boys. Mind you, I didn’t eat at a one of them but I had never seen a Big Boy restaurant or statue before! So I stopped at every one I saw advertised 🙂 I ended up hitting five of them (well, seven, but two of them had no statue to be seen! What’s with that?)
My next stop on my Southgate road trip was Ypsilanti, Michigan, where there was a giant cow on the roof of a “dairy.” Now, by “dairy” I mean a kind of scary store that didn’t have anywhere to park and just had a driveway out front where a kind of scary man stood who would presumably go inside and bring what you wanted to your car… Luckily there was a guy getting “things” in front of me so while he was being taken care of I took some photos and when he left I sped by…
And then we were off to Southgate. Michigan! Right near Southgate there are two glorious side of the highway attractions! First up was the World’s Largest Tire!
And then an oil tank painted like a basketball!
It was a fun afternoon road tripping to Southgate, Michigan, from Chicago! From there it was on to Mallie’s to witness the calamari eating contest…more on that tomorrow…
