Grand Rapids Public Museum and our water tank is finally FIXED, wahooo! {Michigan}

I’m about a month delayed in blog posts, here are some of our adventures from around August 20, 2015. For real time updates – follow us on Instagram!

After our short stop in South Bend, Indiana to tour the Notre Dame stadium we made it up to Grand Rapids, Michigan for our Airstream water tank repair appointment at Woodland Travel Center on August 20.  After exactly ONE month of a broken water tank (and one faulty repair) the repair appointment was finally here and we couldn’t wait!

The staff at Woodland Travel Center are amazing! They were very accommodating – taking our trailer early in the day in hopes that we’d have the whole thing repaired by the end of business day. When you’re dropping your home off for repairs a one-day repair is helpful so you have your bed back by the time the business day is over, no?!  While they worked on fixing our home we headed into downtown Grand Rapids for a day of exploring!

We stopped at our first ever Tim Horton’s and I got a steaming hot cup of coffee to go – a luxury these days! Then we headed to the Grand Rapids Public Museum. Thanks to our ASTC reciprocal museum membership (we purchased a membership to Museum of the Rockies in Montana) we were able to get into this museum FREE (we have saved so much money with this membership!).

Honesty I didn’t have great expectations for this museum – we picked it because it was free, nearby and activity that would keep us busy while our trailer was being worked on. Boy was I surprised – it was fantastic. If you’re going to be in the area I would definitely recommend checking it out – it’s worth it!

Here are some of my favorite highlight from the Grand Rapids Public Museum:

Life size games in the main corridor of the museum.

Lots of historical displays for the Grand Rapids area. This one cracks me up. I’m sure Liam is just looking at the cool ceiling, but this photo couldn’t be staged any better.

The kids spent an inordinate amount of time playing with this puppet theater. I just sat and watched. The kids love these sorts of things and it encourages creative play, so why not!?! Plus we had lots of time to kill.

I LOVED these detailed habitat displays they had for the area. Beautifully done and with lots of hands on activities for the kids so they could engage with the display.

This carousel in the museum is from 1928. It was found in Pennsylvania, moved to the museum and refurbished to look amazing. The original organ still plays the music. There was so much more in the museum, but I’m sure you can only handle so many photos of my kids. . .in museums. 🙂

After the museum we wandered around the shops downtown, grabbed lunch, ran some errands and headed back to Woodland Travel Center a little bit before 5 p.m.

What Woodland Travel Center discovered when they pulled out the water tank (the NEW one that was put in by Shorewood RV), was that this tank was cracked, too! The location of the break looks like it was broken when it was installed. Apparently it’s easy to do if you over tighten the fittings. Ugh! Lucky for us they had one of these water tanks in stock and were able to replace it without waiting for another to ship (thank goodness). Woodland Travel Center also found that the fittings used to install the replacement tank were subpar and were leaking as well. But they fixed it all.

It did take nearly two days to repair – but Woodland Travel Center was adamant that they didn’t want to miss anything to avoid any future heartache down the road (so thankful for that). And they graciously allowed us to stay on site, with electrical hook-ups, for FREE both nights – BONUS! And they did fix us up right – that fresh water tank was sealed up tight when they were done with it.

I would recommend Woodland Travel Center in a heartbeat if you need quality RV work done. . .or you want to buy an Airstream (you know you wanna)! I can’t tell you how happy I was to have a functioning fresh water tank again. . .although only a slight inconvenience it felt good to have it behind us.

Grand Rapids was a wonderful place to visit. The people were friendly, the museum impressive, the community fun to explore. Little did we know this would be the beginning of a two-week stay in Michigan that would continue to awe and amaze us!