It seemed like just yesterday that Twelve Mile Circle chronicled the kid who designed an imaginary town and counted various forms of transportation. Now my elementary aged student is all grown up, a newly-minted university graduate. Those interceding years passed much more quickly than I could have possibly imagined.
Michigan State University is huge (~50,000 students), and so is the number of annual graduates (~13,000 degrees awarded). That’s pretty typical for these behemoth Midwestern land grant universities. It’s so big that graduates got their diplomas at the Breslin Center — the arena where the Spartans play basketball — and it’s a multi-phased affair.
Each component college gets the arena for a specific period, and then it has to keep things moving so the next school can arrive behind it. I took this photo well before our ceremony started and it got considerably more crowded as the event approached. And this was just the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Repeat this several times for the other colleges and that gives a better sense of scale.
Additional Exploration
I got one more opportunity to walk around East Lansing during my brief visit. However this time it wasn’t the middle of winter and that made it a whole lot nicer. Ordinarily I might get nostalgic or maybe even a bit sad in a situation like this because it marked the end of an era. But not this time. The kid got accepted to grad school and will return to Michigan State in September to pursue a master’s degree.
So I guess that means I’ll get several more opportunities to explore East Lansing and its environs in all sorts of weather. Originally I set a goal to visit every county in Michigan’s lower peninsula before graduation and I did that rather convincingly. Now I have about two more years to focus on another goal. Finish the state, maybe?
And Another Brewery
Believe it or not, there are still a couple of local breweries near MSU that I haven’t visited even after four years. I’m slowly chipping away at them and of course now I have some bonus time. This trip we checked out Old Nation Brewery in nearby Williamston, Michigan. We met a couple of the kid’s professors for lunch the day after graduation and discussed some future research possibilities.
The restaurant had pasties (pronounced pass-tee) on the menu so that’s what I ordered to accompany my customary beer flight. It seemed appropriate given our location. Pasties are a type of hand-held meat pie commonly associated with Michigan, particularly the Upper Peninsula, but they sometimes appear further south like what we found here. I got acquainted with them during our Mackinac trip when we spent a week in St. Ignace. Miners from Cornwall brought these tasty delights to America’s Upper Midwest when they immigrated in the Nineteenth Century and the tradition stuck.
A beer flight and a pasty the size of my head was enough to prepare me for an afternoon nap.
Plus a Celebratory Zoo
My older kid is my road trip buddy and we needed to transport a bunch of stuff from the dorm back to the house for the summer. The younger one and my wife wisely flew back home, although they wouldn’t fit in a van packed to the rafters anyway so it didn’t really matter. And if I’m with the older kid that means we’ll probably find a zoo somewhere along the way. This time it was the Toledo Zoo which fell along our direct route. I’ve driven past Toledo numerous times and it was nice to actually stop there for once.
But wait! The Toledo Zoo came with a bonus — a colocated Museum Of Natural History. One admission and two distinct experiences. Well, technically, I guess there were three because the zoo also had an aquarium. I called that quite a bargain and we spent nearly five hours walking around. You can pretty much guarantee that if you travel to a zoo with my gang you’ll see every single animal. And we did.
However, the adventure still had some life in it. We took a less intuitive route home after we left Toledo.
I had some counties to count after all.
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