Capital Region International

In the mid-1980s the West Michigan Horticultural Society in Grand Rapids was searching for land to build a botanical conservatory. They asked Frederik Meijer — the founder of the Meijer grocery chain, who had been buying property east of the city for one of his stores — to donate a parcel. Meijer had already bought a wooded tract along an East Beltline creek for a new supercenter. He looked at the land, decided to put his store elsewhere, and donated 70.7 acres for the garden in January 1991. He and his wife Lena then led a $13 million capital campaign, donated their personal sculpture collection, and opened the gardens to the public in April 1995. Thirty years later, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park has been named the best sculpture park in the United States by USA Today's 10Best readers three years running. The Art Newspaper ranks it among the 100 most-visited art museums in the world. The campus is now 158 acres. The 30-acre outdoor sculpture park, added in 2002, holds 300 sculptures from artists including Rodin, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Edgar Degas, Ai Weiwei, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Nina Akamu's 24-foot bronze "The American Horse" — completed from Leonardo da Vinci's original 1493 design that was never cast in his lifetime — is the campus icon and the photograph everyone takes. The 15,000-square-foot, five-story Lena Meijer Tropical Conservatory is Michigan's largest tropical conservatory. The annual butterfly exhibit (March-April) is the largest temporary butterfly exhibition in the nation — visitors walk among thousands of free-flying butterflies from around the world. The 8-acre Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden, designed by Hoichi Kurisu and opened June 10, 2015, integrates contemporary sculpture (including a 10-foot Anish Kapoor granite work) with traditional zen elements. The outdoor 1,900-seat amphitheater hosts a major concert series each summer. For a state most Americans don't associate with high art, this is an outlier. Grand Rapids has the country's best outdoor sculpture collection because Fred Meijer skipped one supercenter and gave the land away.

Michigan Stadium opened October 1, 1927 at the southwest corner of the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. Coach Fielding Yost designed it with subterranean construction (most of the seating bowl sits below ground level) and a deliberately underbuilt initial capacity of 72,000 with structural provisions to expand. He believed Michigan football would grow to need 100,000 seats. He was right. It took 95 years and several expansions, but the stadium now seats 107,601 — the largest in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest in the world. The "+1" at the end is symbolic: the official capacity is always quoted as one more than the legal limit, supposedly representing former coach Fritz Crisler. ("The Big House" nickname was coined by former Michigan football announcer Bob Ufer in the 1960s.) The bowl design means the stadium is invisible from the surrounding street grid — you do not see it until you are right next to it. Fans arrive on foot through the south gate and emerge at the top of a 30-row bowl that drops 70 feet to field level. The unique acoustics — the bowl traps sound — make a sold-out Michigan game one of the loudest open-air sports venues in the United States. The Michigan football program is the winningest in college football history with over 1,000 victories. Michigan Stadium hosted the largest crowd ever to attend an NHL game — 105,491 for the 2014 Winter Classic between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, an outdoor game on a temporary rink at midfield. It has also hosted soccer crowds over 109,000 for International Champions Cup matches. Yost Ice Arena, Crisler Center (basketball), and the rest of U-M Athletic Campus sit immediately east. The Big House is at the south end of campus; the central diag, undergraduate libraries, and the Burton Memorial Tower (1936, the carillon) sit one mile north along South State Street.

Founded in 1845 by Bavarian missionaries — Frankenmuth ("Courage of the Franconians") preserved its German heritage so completely that the town now leans into Bavarian-style architecture, year-round Christmas (Bronner's Christmas Wonderland is the world's largest Christmas store, on 27 acres), and family-style chicken dinners (Zehnder's and the Bavarian Inn each serve 1+ million chicken dinners annually — among the busiest restaurants in America). From the air, the timber-framed downtown stands out against the surrounding farmland. KOZW Howell is the closest GA airport, or KFNT Flint with a longer drive.

On the field at KAZO. One of America's great aviation museums — over 100 aircraft including an SR-71B Blackbird trainer (one of only two SR-71s with dual cockpits), an F-117 Nighthawk, a P-40 Warhawk, an SBD Dauntless Helldiver in flying restoration. Multiple full-motion flight simulators and a paratrooper simulator make it especially good for kids. The Restoration Hangar lets visitors watch volunteers actively rebuilding aircraft — including ongoing work on a Curtis JN-4 Jenny. Two campuses connected by shuttle. Aviation pilgrimage destination.