Day 4 Part 2

After a brief rest we headed back to the Village (aka the Asylum) where we hiked around the grounds until the buzzing of the bugs got to us and we returned to the shops.  We did a final tasting at Left Foot Charley where we completed our case of local wines with a Riesling and an Apple Cider that tasted like apple pie. Below is a list of our purchases along with some pictures. 

Chateau Fontaine Chardonnay 2010

Chateau Fontaine Big Paw Red blend

Brys Estate Gewürztraminer 2011

Brys Estate Dry Riesling 2011

Brys Estate Riesling 2010

Left Foot Charley Missing Spire Riesling 2011

Left Foot Charley Cinnamon Girl Hard Apple Cider

2 Lads Pinot Noir 2010

2 Lads Cabarnet Franc 2010

Chateau Grand Traverse Late Harvest Chardonnay 2011

Traverse Bay Winery Cherry Wine

Black Star Farms Arcturos Pinot Noir 2010

After the tasting we grabbed a cup of coffee at Higher Grounds and then headed back to the hotel.  We hung around until dinner and then took the short (half-mile) walk to the Cook’s House for dinner.  The meal was fantastic!  An open kitchen, small intimate setting, and wonderful service all made this meal stand out in a series of fantastic meals.  Sarah started with spatzle, had the pork belly for her main, and finished with a rum Bavarian (pudding).  I had a salad with rabbit, a perfectly cooked whitefish, and a rhubarb tart.  A perfect final dinner for a wonderful honeymoon.

Tomorrow morning we’ll fill up on breakfast and gas and then hit the road back to Ann Arbor.  We have some veggies waiting for us from the CSA we’ve been participating in and we’re thinking that might be all we need for the week!  Sarah will be paying for both the gas and breakfast as my credit card finally bit the dust (it was breaking before the trip, but it certainly got its use over the last 4 days).  Thanks to all the friends and family who contributed to our honeymoon fund.  We had a great time and couldn’t have done it without you.  We hope y’all have enjoyed following our little adventure.

Jay

Day 4 Part 1

After seeing so many delicious things at Bay Bread Bakery yesterday I decided that Sarah (the baker) needed to pick some things out for us.  So we went back this morning and bought a pulla (in the brioche/challah family), some mini sticky buns, and a carrot muffin with the intention of skipping lunch and eating treats throughout the whole day.  We finished off the pulla for breakfast, dove into the sticky buns for lunch, and have yet to touch the carrot muffin.  Since we weren’t impressed by their coffee, we went next door to Frenchies, a tiny restaurant and espresso bar that seats 12.  I got a mocha (no drip coffee) and Sarah a latte and we drove back to the hotel to eat and drink our delicious breakfast. 

After a short walk on the beach we headed back up the peninsula to 2 Lads Winery and a brief stop at Black Star (the vineyard opposed to the tasting room in town).  We purchased two bottles at the first and one at the second (all red for a change and bringing our total to 10).  Here’s a picture of 2 Lads for Kyle:

We’re now back at the hotel (wine safe and sound out of the heat) eating some sticky buns before we head back out for our next adventure.

Jay

Day 3

Yesterday began with Jay bringing me breakfast. We knew that we were going to Sleeping Bear Dunes and that we’d need energy for the Dune Climb, so Jay got us some delicious breakfast sandwiches: scrambled eggs and bacon on ciabatta, aka the Egg McMuffin on steroids. 

It was very good and very filling and we were ready for our drive up Leelanau peninsula. Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore was recently named the most beautiful place in the America (or one of them) by some magazine or the other. I agree that it is very beautiful, but I think I still like Big Sur better, but that’s just a matter of preference. After picking up our visitors pass, we went on a scenic drive that took us through gorgeous forest and gave us some great views of the lake. 

By the end of the drive we were ready to get out of the car and….

Climb The Dune.

There’s a big dune at Sleeping Bear Dunes that people climb. It’s a challenge, families do it with their children and then enjoy the view from the top and then sprint, roll, fall back down to the bottom. Never ones to pass on a challenge, Jay and I decided to do the climb.

The Dune, before the climb:

The Dune after the climb:

What? They look the same, you say? Maybe so, but my feelings about the dune were very different between those two shots.

I thought I was in decent shape. I knew it would be difficult, and I knew I’d be breathing hard by the end of it, but I thought I could handle it.

Man I was wrong.

I need to up the resistance on the elliptical, cause I got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by a giant hill of sand.

The view from halfway up:

I was ready to stop here. There’s a plateau before the dune continues up in a couple of directions, but Jay really wanted to make it all the way to the top, so I did my best to endure. I pretty much kept my head down and kept moving and hoped it would all be over soon.

And we made it!!

It was worth it too, cause the view was stunning:

After lingering up top for a little, we ran most of the way down to the bottom, which was ridiculously fun.

After that we drove to Leland, which is a little fishing town. We got lunch at Stonehouse bakery. Jay had some turkey sandwich or another. I had a Peanut Butter Banana and Nutella Panini.

What?

I’m on vacation.

We walked around a little bit in town. There were a couple of cute shops, and I almost got Jay to buy some fudge, but my heart wasn’t really in it so I didn’t try very hard.

After that we went to a winery that had been recommended by one of my coworkers who likes to come up here with her fiancé. All the other wineries we’ve been to usually has something like 15 or maybe 20 wines and you can taste five or six. At Chateau Fontaine they have 10 and you get to try all of them PLUS the cherry wine, and they don’t put regulators on their sampling bottles so the pours are perhaps a little more generous than is necessary. And I have issues with spitting in front of people…so I wouldn’t say that I was even buzzed, but I did feel it a bit more than I had with our other tastings. Between the whites and the reds they offered a “palate cleanser” to showcase their “famous” cheeseball mix.

It was good, and Jay says he finally feels like we live in the Midwest. I married a snot.

Anyway, the wine was delicious, we bought a couple of bottles to add to our growing collection of wine that is probably going to last us for the duration of grad school.

After that we made out way back to Traverse city and headed out to Moomer’s. Moomer’s is the local ice cream place. Almost every place in town that serves ice cream serves Moomer’s and they’re award winning, and it’s been such a very long time since Jay and I had truly fantastic ice cream (It’s kinda bizarre how good the ice cream is in Boston: There’s J.P. Lick’s, Toscanini’s, E. Mack and Bolio’s, Christine’s….) so we’d been looking forward to trying the ice cream, though Jay insisted that we get our first taste at the mother ship and not one of the shops in town that just happened to carry it. So we went to Moomer’s.

That’s just what you picture when you think of ice cream, right? Ice cream, motorcycle gang, the two just go so well together.

Jay got Chocolate Caramel Chunk (or something like that) which was good and I had carrot cake, which was delicious. We ate out on the deck, which smelled a little like cow manure, since the shop is pretty close to the dairy. I didn’t mind. I had ice cream.

After that we went back to the hotel and watched a movie to rest. We went for dinner at a French restaurant in town, Amical. We forgot to take pictures of Jay’s gorgeous French onion soup, but let me tell you, it was impressive. I had a cheese plate for the very first time, and I really liked it. If cheese plates were offered as appetizers more often I’d do it all the time, but I’m not about to pass up dessert for the sake of cheese. It just won’t happen. The rest of the meal was very enjoyable, Jay had mussles, I had risotto, and we finished it with a strawberry-rhubarb cobbler (a la mode of course) that was the perfect end to the evening.

For our last day in Traverse city we’re planning on going to a couple more wineries and maybe going on a hike (though probably not in that order). We already started the day with a delicious Pulla, which is now on my list of “things to try baking myself SOON,” so it looks like it’s going to be a good day.

Sarah

Day 2

We started Tuesday with a tour of the winery at Chateau Chantal.  Despite not being overly impressed by their wines, it was still incredibly interesting to see the process that goes into making them.  We learned about the wine-making process in general and the history of the region and winery.  The first two things you can read about on Wikipedia, so I’ll only share something about the last - the address of  the winery is “1500 rue de vin” after a vat holding 1500 gallons of Riesling fell off the back of a truck when it was being moved from an older location to their expanded facility and thus christened the road.

Since we had kicked off the morning thinking and talking about wine we decided to keep it going.  We stopped at three more vineyards on the peninsula for tastings (broken up by lunch).  Bowers Harbor and Chateau Grand Traverse (whose “late harvest Riesling is one of Sarah’s favorites) were plenty good, but our favorite was Brys Estate (recommended by the waitress at the Boathouse).  

We came away with a total of 5 bottles (3 from Brys and 2 from CGT including their “late harvest Chardonnay).  Though we didn’t especially want to eat lunch we needed something to soak up the alcohol so we stopped at the Peninsula Grill where Sarah had a very interesting pulled pork flatbread and I enjoyed some delicious fish and chips. 

After 3 wineries and some food we decided we’d spent enough time on the peninsula so we headed for town.  We weren’t quite sure where to park so we pulled into our hotel, about a mile from the main strip, hoping for early check-in.  We lucked out and were able to get into our beautiful beach front room.  And by beachfront I mean that we step out of the room and are on the beach.  It reminds me of Encinitas except there are ducks on the beach and no saltwater smell.  We dropped the bags and walked into town where we stopped at a fascinating Lego “play center” where they had all kinds of Legos for kids to play with and none for sale (Sarah’s note: If they’d had any for sale, we totally would have gotten some, that place made me want to PLAY).  That's all legos: 

 Except the one on the right, that's Sarah.

After that was a stop at a café for refueling where they served gorgeous espresso drinks, delicious coffee, and adorable “morsels” – basically teeny-tiny cakes.  

Despite our attempts to stay moving, Sarah was wiped so we headed back to the room where she took a two-hour nap (and I composed the post about the Boathouse). 

When Sarah awoke we started to think about dinner.  Neither of us was very hungry and nothing sounded good.  Then we started eating Tums.  Magically, menus started to look appealing.  We decided on Stella, an Italian restaurant located in the former asylum.  And what a wonderful decision it was.  Almost all of the food was local (as is true of many of the restaurants up here) and the freshness was apparent.  Sarah started with sweetbreads atop whipped Gorgonzola and had pasta with duck (surprise surprise), sautéed onions, grapes, and mascarpone.  I chose the grilled octopus (though there were bits of sausage that were really the star) and had a simple pasta with sautéed porcini mushrooms in a tomato sauce.  For dessert we shared a strawberry crostata (with some of those fresh strawberries Sarah raved about in a perfect crust) and blueberry-basil and vanilla-rhubarb gelatos.  An excellent meal all around and the small portions made it the perfect remedy for the previous night’s errors.

 After that it was back to the hotel room, where we kept the door open and listened to the waves as long as we could stand the cold before finally locking up and going to sleep. (Sarah’s note: and I let Jay watch the basketball game. I want credit for that).

Jay

Day 1 Part 2

After lunch we decided to head over to “The Village at Grand Traverse Commons” which is an area with some shops, a couple of wine tasting rooms, and a farmers market (on Mondays).

Oh, and it’s an old asylum.

How does that not make it into the name!? What is this “The Village” crap! How can you not HIGHLIGHT the fact that this massive, old building on 300 acres of gorgeous green land used to house crazy people during an era when Asylums were terrifying places????

Maybe not everyone would see that as a selling point….

But I think it’s pretty cool.

Anyway, we’re going to be going over there at least one more time for dinner later this week, but they have a farmer’s market on Mondays from 2-6 so we thought it would be fun to stop by. We got there before the market started so we went into the shops area, which is full of fairly typical and adorable boutiques and galleries and the tasting room for Black Star Farms. The guy working in there was just finishing up with a really big group of people when we got there, so we wandered a little and looked at their offerings. They’re also a distillery, and they have some pretty good looking fruit brandies and fortified wines in addition to their regular wine.  We sat down and started talking to the guy working behind the counter. We tried five wines (and then a sixth cause the guy was being nice and wanted us to try the cherry dessert wine along with some dark chocolate – YUM). All the wines were really good, but the two that really stuck out were the pinot noir, (which has won awards and is probably the best Pinot I’ve ever had, I fear all pinot noirs will pale in comparison to this wine at least until I’ve managed to forget how smooth and complex and DELICIOUS it was) and the Maple Dessert wine. He told us about how they got the idea for this wine. They had some sugar maple trees out on the farm and they would run lines down the hill from the tapped trees into the trough down in the parking lot which was set over an open fire (20-50 liters of sap go into making 1 liter of maple syrup, thank you Wikipedia). The people who were working the fire would drink apple brandy to stay warm (cause the open fire wasn't enough?), but some people, for whom the brandy was too strong, would cut it with the “maple water.” So that’s how they got the idea.

It’s an apple wine, strengthened with apple brandy, with a splash of maple syrup thrown in and it is delicious.  We also got a couple of souvenir glasses which we can take to any of the Black Star tasting rooms (there’s one not too far from where we’re staying) at any time and try 5 wines whenever we want. We will probably be taking them up on that offer.

I never got the guys name, but he was a really friendly and pleasant person to talk to and a fantastic way to begin our honeymoon. He encouraged us to wait to buy wine, since it’s hot today and we didn’t want to risking overheating our wine in the car, and then he pointed us towards the farmers market, which was our next stop.

We wandered across the street to a lawn that had a few tables spread out on it with people selling goods. There was a guy selling taquitos and a woman selling homemade baking mixes among others. As we were walking by a man selling wild leeks and homemade herb mixes, he picked up one of his mixes and said “This one is really good, I just invented it…or discovered it, I guess, it was out there, I just found it.” Which give me this image of a man wandering around in the woods, picking leaves, drying them and seeing how they do on his food.

We smiled and moved on.

The next table was full of gorgeous looking strawberries which I’d been hoping to see. I asked to try one, and the girl just said “Strawberries are $4 a quart.” I don’t know if she didn’t hear me say “try” or what, but I decided it was worth it.

AND IT WAS.

It’s less that 24 hours later as I write this and Jay and I ate them ALL.

After grabbing our strawberries, and with me merrily munching on them all the way, we went over to Higher Grounds coffee which was in a building just off the lawn where the market was being held. They roast their own coffee in small batches (you know, 20 pounds or something like that, not 8 ounces like Jay). The building isn’t air conditioned at it was quite warm outside, so it was even warmer inside. It’s very much a hippie coffee shop. They sell all kinds of fair trade goods, and have a bunch of CDs from local artists. Jay ordered some Guatemalan for us, made in a Chemex (they offer multiple brewing methods). Once the coffee got to us, I loaded it up with half and half and demerara sugar (Damn, no skim milk or splenda in sight, damn, damn, damn.) and we enjoyed perfectly hot coffee in an uncomfortably warm coffee shop and DIDN’T CARE cause it was THAT GOOD. With the cream and sugar it tasted like dulce de leche. it was delicious, and I’m pretty sure it’s only partly because of the stuff I added. 

After we finished our coffee (and wiped the sweat off of our faces) we headed back to the car and headed north up the Old Mission Peninsula to our bed and breakfast at Chateau Chantal.

The drive up was both very pretty and a little sad. While we were all enjoying a fantastically warm March up here in Michigan, the cherry and apple growers were mourning their own inability to tell their trees not to bloom yet. When the inevitable last frost came, the cherry and apple blossoms died and the orchards lost 75-95% of their crop. So instead of seeing cherry trees heavy with almost ready to pick fruit, we just saw trees. Every once in while you might catch a glimpse of red on a branch that managed to cling to some of its flowers, but for the most part it was one big reminder that we wouldn’t be getting much in the way of Michigan cherries this year. Fortunately, grapes are a little slower to bloom and were little more than sticks when the warm weather in came in March, so the wineries aren’t out a years work. A lot of them also make cherry wine though, so it’s a shame that they won’t be able to make it this year.

After a gorgeous drive up the peninsula, with certain points narrow enough that you could see water on either side, we got to Chateau Chantal, which sits at the very top of a hill right in the middle between the bays, so we had a fantastic view all around. 

The woman working at the front desk welcomed us and showed us our room, which is about the same size as our last apartment in Boston….or maybe a little bigger.  She showed us to the tasting room and told us the rules: guests can taste as many wines as they want for free and each guest is permitted a glass of wine per night. If we wanted to hold the tasting until after the tasting room was already closed, we could help ourselves to anything that was open (on the honor system, sounds good to me, we didn’t take advantage of this, since we were both on the verge of a food coma by the time we got back that night, but it was cute). 

After we settled in to the room, we went on a short drive up to the top of the peninsula to a place called light house park. 

We walked on the beach and Jay got a little giddy at having sand between his toes. I also got a picture of a black squirrel (though I had to chase him around a tree or two to get it). I’m slightly obsessed with black squirrels cause I’d never seen them until we got to Michigan. I feel like they would make really good villains in the Redwall books, or something like that, but this one was actually really cute. I’m pretty sure he’s on the younger side.

After that we headed back to the B&B and went to do some wine tasting.

So…the wine….

eh.

The wine at Chateau Chantal was actually pretty disappointing. I don’t have much to say about it. We did get to taste some Icewine, which was DELICIOUS but Icewine is always delicious, and I don’t think it’s all that impressive to create a delicious icewine, especially when you’re charging $70 for a bottle. There also seems to be a correlation between wines we like and pleasant bar tenders (for lack of a better term). Jay wondered if our tastes were so easily influenced by the people selling the wine, but I decided that it's just a lot easier to be nice and friendly when you know the wine you're selling is really good. 

At 8:00 we went to dinner at the Boathouse. I’ve always wanted to do a tasting menu, and they had one that was actually really well priced and also somewhat customizable so we could make sure there wasn’t anything on there that Jay wouldn’t eat, so I managed to talk Jay into it. I take full responsibility for that. It was a fantastic meal and almost all of the dishes we had were truly phenomenal, but the boathouse and I apparently have different ideas of what “Seven course tasting menu” means. I think that means seven delicious courses, scaled down appropriately for the number of courses you’re have. For them, “tasting menu” apparently means 7 full courses.

It was rough.

We barely made it through all the courses. We didn’t finish the sixth, and we took the dessert to go.

It was delicious food, but at this point I can still remember how miserable I was after we were done, so descriptions are going to have to wait until a time when I can think about it without my stomach hurting. But the steak knives were really neat, so here's a picture.

We stumbled home, groaning in gluttonous pain, and did our best to sleep.

Coming up on Day 2:

The Winery tour

3 more wine tastings

Our new hotel room

The magic of Tums