On Location: Holland, Michigan (Part I)



Holland, Michigan



This past weekend, Josh and I took a short "beat the February blues" trip to Holland, Michigan. We left Saturday morning around 10am, arrived by 12:30pm, and left Sunday around 2pm. Though we have just over 24 hours of experience with the town and community, our conclusion is that Holland has a lot to recommend it...

DAY 1

Our trip started with lunch at the New Holland Brewing Company pub, which - in addition to what Josh tells me is great beer - also makes its own spirits. Overall the food was good (a decent vegetarian selection, promotion of local products, and house made corned beef), the ambiance great (a huge multi-tiered building with ample natural light and a beautiful copper brewing system in plain view), and the experience a positive way to make a first impression. With full stomachs and a whole lot of enthusiasm, we set off to explore the city by foot.

Some of what we saw:

• Hope College campus - beautiful architecture and pleasant small college feel
• Kollen Park - a very cute green space integrated into the downtown region with walkways along Lake Macatawa, playgrounds, and vistas
• Heinz Pickle Factory - the largest in the world (we could actually see the giant pickle barrels for fermentation and smell the brine)
• "Ice Melt" sidewalk system - genius method of recycling hot water waste from the power plant by running it through piping under the downtown sidewalks to melt the snow and ice (seriously, these sidewalks were spotless)
• Farmers' Market space - nice covered area next to the civic centerW

In all truth, we ended up seeing quite a bit more than that. You see, Josh and I are pretty serious walkers. We lived for a year without a car, solidifying our habit of relying on our own two feet (and occasionally our bikes) to get where we need to go (including the 2 mile commute to and from work everyday). My thought is that it's good for the environment and it's good for us, so we're no strangers to prolonged series of one foot in front of the other. That said, even by our standards, our trek through Holland was pretty epic, totaling somewhere around 8 miles according to Google maps.

"The Holland Hike" Walking Route

The beauty of pedi-exploration is that you get to see a good deal that might otherwise go unnoticed, the details that require proximity and a slower pace to register. For instance, on top of seeing some of the attractions listed above, we also got a feel for the lay of the city. Many of the houses downtown seemed to be rental properties, and not just the ones near the campus. Ann Arbor has its fair share of "student ghettos" in the downtown area (which these weren't), but still, for us it was hard to imagine that walking further away from town would bring us closer to the kind of neighborhood we were looking for. 

It's hard to qualify exactly, but right around when we turned off South Shore Drive and onto Graafschap, all of a sudden we started to feel more like we'd found something. For instance, each lot was nearly an acre, people were outside shoveling snow and doing other household chores, there was even a small stream that ran through a series of backyards. This just felt like a good place...

CityFlats Hotel in Holland, Michigan

What we ended up settling on (at least for the time being) is that if we were to live in Holland, we would look for a house 2 or so miles from the downtown area. This would give us enough land for some serious gardens, we'd still be walkable to the town center, and we'd be privy to a good neighborly feel (literally every person we passed - and we passed a number - said hello). 

Our walk concluded around 5pm, when we wandered back to the car and drove over to CityFlats Hotel to check-in. In addition to being pleasantly modern, exceptionally clean, and very comfortable, the hotel is LEED gold certified, meaning it lives up to certain environmental stewardship standards. With tired feet and good consciences, we enjoyed the hotel amenities and prepared for our second day in what might someday be our new hometown...

TO BE CONTINUED