Lansing, Michigan’s capital city is fairly centrally located in the more populous southern part of the state about an hour and a half west of Detroit. I recall passing through the city on the highway when I was nine years old. I went along for the ride with my dad’s cousin Audrey to take her daughter Deb back to school in late August at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. I knew all the state capitals, so being able to see the dome of a state capitol building from the highway was pretty cool.  The drive was all business, though, about 800 miles each way to take Deb back to school with no stopping or sightseeing along the way. Despite a few trips to Michigan since, this is my first time back through Lansing.

State capital cities often have a white collar employment base and tend to be fairly nice. Lansing also has a very large university with Michigan State University located in suburban East Lansing. The school doesn’t seem to have too much of an impact on downtown Lansing, though. I found it to be a few commercial buildings around the Capitol building, a street with a bunch of restaurants and cafes which were mostly not open yet when I was there in the morning, and then pretty rundown areas within not too many blocks of the capitol in the directions I traveled through. I was expecting a thriving college town and capital city somewhat more like Madison, Wisconsin but was quite disappointed overall with what I saw of Lansing.

Having worked in the state capitol building in Denver for several years, I usually make it a point to visit state capitol buildings along the way as I crisscross the country.  Michigan’s stands on a four city block green park and has a quite nice situation.  An avenue leads directly towards it from the east with nice views of the dome between the downtown’s few buildings more than a couple stories tall. Fitting for a rather large and historically prosperous state, the capitol building ranks as one of the more impressive I’ve seen on my travels with quite ornate senate and house chambers, significant works of art in the rotunda, and portraits of the governors.  Being summer, the legislature wasn’t in session and the building was nearly deserted except for a half dozen or so other tourists and a few people doing restoration work.  I was surprised I didn’t have to go through any security or present an I.D. or anything to walk around the place. The governor’s office was closed and locked, although I could view the legislative chambers from the entrances and the galleries. Unlike the capitol building in Denver, it appears there isn’t even much permanent staff housed in the capitol itself.  

From Lansing I headed north via a somewhat circuitous route through the central and north-central part of Michigan to take in the last nine counties in the state I hadn’t been through before.  It’s what I call “collecting counties” and with these last few I have now been through all 88 counties in the state, the 30^th state in which I’ve been in every county in the state.