Petoskey Weekend Getaway Part 2

You can catch part one here. Saturday morning we slept in, ate breakfast in the hotel and then went for a drive to see all the pretty houses. There were so many gorgeous, humongous houses to see! I was surprised by how many houses were boarded up because they were just SUMMER homes. Crazy! What do these people do for a living?! I would like to know. I want to come back in the summer and see these houses in all their glory. And the yachts. I've heard there are many yachts in this town. LOVE. I want to live here.

We found a park and bundled up and took a walk. This is Little Traverse Bay. Not frozen yet, woohoo!

I just couldn't get over the waves. It looked like Myrtle Beach with those white caps!

It was a very scenic walk. We had the gorgeous views of the water on our right and pretty, old houses on our left. 

After all that house gawking and walking we were hungry. We went to my favorite place of the whole trip, City Park Grill.

So, as you know I like to read. I like architecture and I like beer. Well this bar was built in the 1800’s, illegally sold alcohol during prohibition (awesome little speak easy), Earnest Hemingway lived on Lake Walloon in the summers and frequented this bar just adding to an insane amount of history to this place. 

It’s a really old bar with an amazing atmosphere (original ceiling tiles, incredible bar with intricate detail in every inch of the wood, perfectly restored building…the works). 

This bar was owned by a guy named Frank back in the day who actually hung himself in the basement and people joke that it’s ‘haunted’ by Frank to this day. I don’t believe that of course, however Shorts had this really good beer they named ‘Hanging Frank’ after this bar / that owner. They had a lot of backlash about the name of the beer (its offensive, even more so – the label!) so they renamed it ControversiALE (bahaha, so funny how they play on words). So basically I walked in this place and just melted. 

G of course ordered a ControversiALE to drink. 

I got this cinnamon, coriander beer that was so good.

 G got a burger and I got their Short's beer battered fish 'n chips. So good! 

After our meal our waiter said we could get a tour of the basement. OF COURSE YES! I overheard kids talking about how scary the basement was because mediums believed Frank was actually murdered down there. I didn't think the basement was that creepy at all, though our waiter would not go near where they believe the murder took place. I loved seeing the remnants of the tunnels and hidden stair case used to smuggle the booze in. So cool! The picture above is of one of the tunnels that is now blocked off due to a fire. It's so cool to see that history and know an actual speak easy was here back in the day. I'm pretty sure you get immensely smarter just walking through the front door of this place. Such a fun experience!

We heard good things about Roast and Toast so we headed there afterwards. It is such a cute little coffee shop with tons of model boats on the wall and ceramic cups on the entrance. I got the Cinnamon Toast Latte and it was amazing. We drank our coffee and walked around and explored the different shops. We went to an awesome spice shop and met the sweetest puppies, talked to the owner and walked out with a Coffee BBQ spice and curry powder. There were so many cute shops. I love window shopping on vacation. They had this store called The Man Cave which I'm sure made G's day. We also stumbled upon a winery and did a tasting, bought a bottle of port and talked to the guy that worked there.

He said we definitely needed to go across the street and check out Pallet Bistro so we went there afterwards for a drink.

The views at Pallet were awesome! We were told to ask for the corner window table and the view was perfect!

G got a chocolate peppermint martini and I had the caramel apple martini. They were both really good. It was fun to just talk about our day, our favorite parts of vacation and just relax and enjoy the view.

It was almost dinner time and we were beat. We saw great reviews on Yelp for this Thai restaurant so we grabbed it to go and headed back to the hotel. We watched movies, ate Thai food and relaxed. It was such a fun day!

We slept in Sunday, ate breakfast at the hotel and then headed to our friend's house to grab Manny. G's friend watched Manny while we were gone and it was so nice to know he was in good hands. Manny was pretty spoiled and I'm sure misses that fenced yard, ha! 

It was a great weekend away. I highly recommend Petoskey if you're ever in Michigan. It's a gem of a city and I loved it!