And Michigan State

The last stop of our mini-vacation was East Lansing, Mich., to visit Michigan State University. Our tour wasn't until 1 p.m. Wednesday so we thought we'd bore the children to death and take them on a tour of the state capitol. They whined the entire time.

Here, feigning interest, they're all looking at the ceiling of the House chamber. The ceiling included seals from all the states and they were searching for Illinois.

And just to make sure they were really bored, Andy made us all walk across the capital complex to check out the Supreme Court building. Ugh.

I think we were all surprised at how large the Michigan State campus is. We listened to an admissions talk for about 40 minutes before we headed out on the student-led tour of campus. B and L both fell asleep during the talk. Here's the campus bell tower:

I think this is a random classroom building:

In addition to being large, the campus is very wooded. There's even a river running through it. Our tour guide said if a bike gets stolen it sometimes ends up in the river.

This is the dorm we went into on the "north" area of campus. The campus has five, I think, residential areas. Each one has its own health center and at least one food court that stays open until midnight.

This was the lobby area of the dorm building. The room was pretty typical. They told us this building was constructed around World War II.

Of course, we stopped at a bookstore and L found a wig. She also had some ice cream from the school's dairy store. They make flavors to represent all the Big Ten schools. L chose Purdue Tracks - vanilla with caramel swirl and fudge footballs. It has so much fat content that it can't be sold as ice cream outside the university.

We were leaving Michigan at dinner time so decided to stop at Redamak's to have dinner. It's a typical stop for us when we go to our church camp in the fall.