A School of Fish?

Our Format.  Our intent is to provide short snippets of each of the wineries and signs we stop at during our quests, rather than write one blog about the whole day’s adventure. Hopefully that will make for easier reading. Also, I would like this to be your definitive resource for the exact locations of each sign we visit. What I discovered while researching the locations of all Michigan Historical Markers is this: it often appears that the author took a map of Michigan and threw a dart at it, and then that point became the location of whatever sign they happened to be thinking about. Case in point:

The website I use as my “gold source” for Michigan Historical Markers showed a marker in the middle of Lake Michigan. Thinking it may be the marker for an historical offshore lighthouse, I clicked on it for more information. Much to my disappointment, the marker was assigned to The Norwood School. Why would a school marker be located in the middle of Lake Michigan? My wife deadpanned that they could be marking the location for a School of Fish. Thinking that highly unlikely, I did more research and found that the Norwood School was actually located 19 miles south of where the gold source website had it located. I have found numerous errors since, and each reference website I look at seems to have copied the location from the same gold source website I am using. This is frustrating because each visit now could lead to a wild goose chase. To fix that, I am in the process of locating the exact coordinates (latitude and longitude) for each sign. An arduous task at best, but hopefully one that will make it a lot easier for others who want to visit signs without wondering if the location they are driving to will actually be the location of a real sign. My recommendation would be to copy the coordinate I provide into your GPS app of choice, and that should lead you to the exact location.

Besides offering the correct locations of the signs we visit, our intent is to also provide some additional information about visiting the sign – where to park, is the sign visible from the road or will you have to take a short walk to get to it, and any other tidbit of information we learn that may make it easier for you when you visit. We’ll also provide pictures to help with the visual context of the sign’s surroundings.

If your visit yields information different than what we described in our story, please contact us and let us know. Sometimes signs will be moved, or temporarily taken down for construction purposes, so we would love to hear about your experiences and how they may differ from when we visited.

Regarding the wineries, we will provide its location as well as the URL of the winery’s website so you can find out more details about the winery. We will share our thoughts and observations about each winery, what we liked and what we didn’t. We are by no means expert wine tasters, so we will not offer critiques on the quality of the wines, but we will share what wines we liked best based on our personal preferences. Hopefully we will provide enough information to spark your interest so you will visit these wineries and experience them for yourself.