Bronner's Christmas Wonderland

 

One of the things we learned a few vacations ago was to try to plan something fun to enjoy on the way home. It makes the goodbye to the main part of vacation slightly less painful.

Our very last day of vacation was stunning. All the rain from the day before was gone, and we had a beautiful day to travel!

We always do a sad face picture before we come home. And also, for the record, we are not usually souvenir shirt people, but that is how much we loved Mackinac! We sure did buy shirts and wore them proudly!

On our way out of St. Ignace we stopped at one more coffee shop for some road fuel. It was so cute, and we were so sad we had missed the chance to go there and hang out earlier in the trip. (They closed at 2 p.m. each day and we needed them in the evening!

One last trip over the bridge…

…and in about three hours, we had arrived at our day-destination! I have wanted to take Ryan to Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland for our entire marriage. I went there about 20 years ago (with Mark and Lynnette, actually) and have this photo to show for it.

If you are not familiar, Bronner’s (in Frankenmuth, Michigan), is the world’s largest Christmas store. The building, per the website, is the size of 5 ½ football fields. (Now, this is my kind of football!!)

They have all the stuff, not just for Christmas, but for other holidays as well! Ryan and I have several ornaments (gifted to us) that came from here, and it was fun to add some of our own choices to that collection              

First, though, we started with lunch in their little café. We topped it off with Christmas cookies, because it seemed wrong, somehow, to shop at the world’s largest Christmas store without getting a Christmas treat!

Then we started shopping. It was SO FUN! I think I enjoyed it more than Ryan did, but he was a great sport about it.

After we shopped, we walked across the parking lot to the Silent Night Chapel. This is a replica of the chapel in Austria that stands in honor of where the Christmas hymn was first sung. It was a beautiful little chapel.

At last, we had to head for home…for real. We stopped on the way for some coffee, and we also stopped for dinner, which was an abysmal experience. Wendy’s really let us down on this trip. (We are big fans, but not this time.)

We paused for an official back-home-again-in-Indiana photo and then powered through the last little bit to arrive home. Our lake view was so pretty that night. Significantly smaller than Huron, but still lovely.

I’m so glad we did this trip. It was refreshing and so full of great memories!