Traverse City, MI: Cherry Republic Embassy

After leaving Sleeping Bear Dunes, we headed to Traverse City. We found a place to sleep after a crazy "why are all the hotels completely full" search (we've managed to get the last or almost-last room in town more times than I should admit...but am I strangely proud of this? yes). In the morning we woke up and headed to the Cherry Republic.

One of my friends in high school used to go here every summer and he would always bring me back cherry goods, most notably some cherry soda. I love real, fresh cherries, and I wanted to take Eric here to get him to like cherries too :)

Basically the inside of this store was exactly what I was hoping for. They had a cherry wine and soda tasting bar, where you could try all the samples you wanted for free (21+ for the wine). I love soda fountains, so a cherry-soda soda fountain was awesome. There were bottles and bottles of wine and soda lining the walls.

I liked most of the wines but the soda is really where the got us.

We wound up buying the regular Cherry Soda Pop and the Black Cherry Cream Soda. It was so good! Especially the black cherry. I could have bought about a million other things in here, too -- chocolate covered cherries, cherry salsa, dried cherries, trail mix, cherry barbeque sauce... The terrible part about the Internet is how easy it is to buy these things without needing to be in Michigan :)

The store has lots of samples and you are encouraged to sample as much as you want. Obviously, as soon as you taste this stuff, you want to buy it, so it's a great marketing scheme. The other fun thing (that I didn't grab a photo of, unfortunately) is this enormous bin of dried cherry pits that you can play with. It was a big attraction for the little kids who jumped in to swim.

If you ever find yourself in Traverse City, stop into their Embassy. They have a few other locations around Michigan too, with slightly different offerings at each (for example, their headquarters in Glen Arbor has a cafe! How awesome would that be). Have you ever been there?