Carriage Ride

And this is the marvelous view I woke up to this morning.  This is the view outside my window looking the other direction of the view I posted in my last post.  Isn't it gorgeous!  We began the day with a buffet breakfast down in the dinning room.  Since it was a super chilly day, my mom and I ordered hot chocolate to enjoy with our morning meal.

Then I headed out to the porch to steal a few moments on the rockers and enjoy the beautiful morning light

Then we met up with the rest of the tour group and divided up into different carriages for a tour around the entire island.  It was so fun to see the entire place by horse and carriage!  Half of the island is the cute little town and the other half is a state park, so it is gorgeous, undisturbed greenery sprinkled with a few fall leaves!

After touring through the down we went back up past the Grand to get up in the state park that is behind the hotel. 

We made one stop at a look out point and to see the top of Arch Rock, one of the most famous landmarks on the island.  Legend has it that the arch was sculpted from the never ending flow of tears of a young native American girl who's lover had been killed.  It is a beautiful look out point.

Our lovely carriage ride ended at Fort Mackinac, the next activity on today's agenda.  The British built the fort during the American Revolutionary War to control the strategic straits of Michigan between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron (and by extension the fur trade on the Great Lakes) and did not relinquish it until fifteen years after American independence. It later became the scene of two strategic battles for control of the Great Lakes during the War of 1812.

We got to watch the cannon fire demonstration and learn a little bit about what life was like at the fort during it's days of operation.

The fort is the second highest point on the island, so it had amazing views of the island.

We had fun playing in the kids section ... 

After we had spent a couple of hours at the fort, we headed down into town to do some window shopping

Mackinac Island is famous for it's fudge.  About 90% of their stores, are fudge and candy shops with a random souvenir shop here and there.  So, we really had no choice, we had to buy some fudge.  It would just be wrong to travel to and island full of fudge and not indulge in any.  The hardest part of buying fudge, is deciding which of the many fudge shops to walk into.  Once we had picked a place, then came the hard task of deciding which flavors to get.  Luckily, they let us have samples of most of them before we picked the ones we wanted to buy.  After many samples and some serious discussion, we ended up getting a fourth pound of chocolate, cherry chocolate, pumpkin pie, chocolate mint, penuche, and salted caramel chocolate

For lunch, I got a big ball of cookie dough covered in chocolate, a very healthy choice