Michigan's Little Bavaria

Zehnder's and The Bavarian Inn are the two most popular family-style restaurants, and people will wait hours during the peak holiday seasons to eat at either one. In addition to these world-famous dinners, tourist will stroll Main Street through a town that is reminiscent of a Bavarian mountain town.

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Recently, Frankenmuth added a riverwalk of shops and restaurants. While we were there, there was a Shakespearian insult show in the commons area.

Additionally, there are the numerous original gift shop and curio stores along the main street. And, as always, on the south end of town, there is Bronners, the world's largest holiday trinket shop ever. The owners have devoted their lives to Christmas.

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Parking is everywhere. There is also a horse-drawn carriage service.

They offer basic single and double rooms. The website says the 63 new "suites" have been added. The resort is completely self-contained making it, during a winter stay, much easier to get to and from the pools.

The hotel's parking lot abuts the parking lot of Bronner's Christmas store/complex. The place is huge! Think of six football fields, three wide, two tall, all under a single roof.

While Zehnder's and the Bavarian Inn directly across the street have separate menus from which to order, it is highly recommended that you just settle in for the traditional family-style chicken dinners: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, corn, rolls, buttered noodles with bread crumbs, and stollen (a type of Christmas bread) all make up the nearly bottomless meal. Wash it down with a nice, cold beer--ja!

Indoor water parks seem to be the hit of the new millennium. We stayed at two this summer, one in Sandusky, OH, and the other in our own backyard. For $155 for the night at Zehnder's Splash Village, we got four admission tickets from check-in, good until 4pm the next day, to the water park.

Zehnder's had two high tube slides that you have to climb several stories to get to. I was nearly always winded. Once you reach the bottom, you are directed into a lazy river with a series of dump buckets, water squirters, and a waterfall to keep you soaked. There is a kidding pool with a variety of swings, slides, and erupting fountains of water.

The highlight here, like all indoor water parks, is the 200-gallon bucket of water that tips and douses those below it, spilling through a safety fence into the kidding pool. There is also another water slide and a series of water-spraying gadgets to play with along the way.

West of I-75 at exit 136A is the mega-retail center called Birch Run, which is also the name of the town. Originally famous for Tony's Truck Stop, where a BLT has a pound of bacon and three large tomatoes, Birch Run has added an additional dimension to the Frankenmuth exit by creating a massive retail outlet type of outdoor mall.