Frankenmuth Travel Guide

A FREE Laser light show, set to music is featured each evening in the Festival Platz (Outdoor ampitheater). Laser show hours vary depending on when it gets dark enough to enjoy the show. The children will love this...as an adult, I didn't really enjoy it all that much. You have to wait until approximately 10:00 p.m. for the show to start and the stores are closed at 9:00 p.m. so you sit around for an hour hoping you are sitting in a good spot to see the show. The children were playing in the grassy area in front of the theatre before the show started so they were having fun. There is a reason why this show is FREE...I wouldn't pay to see it.

Enjoy a fabulous narrated tour up and down the Cass River on a 70-ton nostalgic paddle wheel boat. Ramped, handicap- accessible dock is located in the heart of Frankenmuth River Place.

I was a little surprised that we got stuck in a traffic jam on our way out of Frankenmuth but I think that it was because it was around 5 pm on a Sunday afternoon and it had just started raining. We waited for about 15 minutes to make the turn at Birch Run and to get back on highway 75 which also had a fair amount of traffic.

I think that after eating at the Bavarian Inn restaurant, that I can sympathize with many a historical figure because I too now know what it feels like to be BETRAYED!

We sat down to a $44 dinner which promised substantial helpings of sauerbraten, bratwust, wiener schnitzel, "famous" fried chicken and a healthy array of side dishes. We received a completely different animal altogether.

The previously frozen and more than a day old bread should have provided warning enough, but sadly, we still had faith that so many people couldn't be so wrong. The "sides" turned out to be a pitiful moose scat of mass produced, mayonaisse sogged salads that couldn't impress an Ethiopian famine victim three weeks after the departure of the last UN rice convoy. Though they served a very nice chicken soup, sans chicken but with a quality pasta, however, the remainder of the menu simply fell flat even before an unsophisticated palette.

After such a disappointing beginning, sadly, the worst was yet to come. The featherweight plater of meat proved a insubstantial as it was poorly prepared. I realized at once why the waitress had stubbornly refused to discuss the weight of the meats, callously allowing me to presuppose out loud that four measly ounces would be the portion alloted for each of the promised meats. Even this relatively conservative estimate far outweighed the miserly slivers of protein grudgingly alloted by the owners. What was, in theory, a bratwurst, turned out to be a flavorless sausage the size of my diminutive wife's little finger, hardly worthy of the name "sausage" let alone finding its place on the touted menu of a the standout restaurant of Michigan's "Little Bavaria". The sauerbraten proved even more disappointing, a piece of meat sliced so thin it could not possibly have been cut by hand. You could not have made half a sandwich with what they delivered. The schnitzel, while larger, had to have been under two ounces as well, made all the lighter by the fact that every tiny bit of juice seemed to have been squeezed from the B grade meat.

The Bavarian Inn touts its fried chicken as the finest in Michigan, proudly boasting that it and it alone is what made not just the inn, but the town of Frankenmuth. If this is true, then Frankenmuth is in a much more sorry state than meets the eye. Although qualitatively adequate, the minute portions again would fail to please even a relatively meager second grader. The pitiful excuse offered, that if we had placed an additional order, free seconds would have applied, did nothing, absolutely nothing, to change the fact that $44 dollars changed hands in exchange for a meal which would more properly rate $10 out the door, including tax and tip. Telling me that if we chose to spend $66 dollars we would have been provided with more of their slop carried no weight whatsoever.

Needless to say, if you visit Frankenmuth, avoid the Bavarian Inn at all costs! Even a culinary novice can tell it is really a farm which harvests the money of hard working visitors while delivering nothing but disappointment in return. I wil be forking over a similar sum of money to the state of Michigan for a lapse in my vehicle speed, and will pay it with far less grumpiness than I paid to the Bavarian Inn for their so-called "meal".

Fun Alternatives: Try any other place, but nothing here

Clothing/Shoes/Weather Gear: This is Michigan, and as the saying goes "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." Last year we paked fall clothes, and enjoyed a beautiful day, the next day we froze half to death, as the tempature had dropped nearly 20 degrees. Long story short, pack for long walks outside.