Drove south to Grand Rapids today to visit the Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. It’s a lovely place, really well designed; it was recently voted as one of the thirty must-see museums in the world. It’s a hundred + acres of trees and plants with sculpture scattered throughout the landscape. It’s very well laid out and really easy to walk around to view all the sculptures, even in the sweltering heat. It was hot, actually only about 90, but the humidity here is evil, and constantly sweaty is not a good condition to be in. We saw some really cool sculptures by the likes of Rodin and Moore, and some that were just okay. The central piece of the park is a 24ft tall Leonardo da Vinci horse; Nina Akuma sculpted it from his design. There is an exhibit going on at the moment featuring the work of Dale Chihuly who has created some beautiful pieces from glass; I especially liked the bunch of balloons floating from the roof of one of the greenhouses and the sculpture called ‘Listening to History’ – guess which one from the pictures below. After walking around the sculpture garden we checked out the gardens which included a Victorian garden, an arid garden, and a carnivorous plant house (which was filled with kids). I really wanted a small version of one of the glass flower bowls from the gift shop, created by Chihuly, but Mike didn’t have $7,500 with him – maybe next time.
On the way home we stopped off in Sparta and had pretty good Mexican food, enchiladas and bean tacos, yummm.

Mike: Nothing more to say, worth seeing. It’s hot!