The Big Trip Home: Albany to UP Michigan

We are on our way back to the Pacific Northwest! Our day began before 4am and it is now 10:30pm as I sit and type this at The Quality Inn in St. Ignace, Michigan. We pushed extremely hard and drove for over 14 hours. The best I can offer at this point is a picture summary of today's events.

By the time we had the car packed up, it was 5am. The kids were thrilled to be up so early! Also, notice that our car was a mess from the very beginning. We also failed to remember proper luggage for our road trip and all of our stuff was off on the moving truck before we realized. So, we have several trash bags filled with miscellaneous items and clothing. It's super classy to drag trash bags into hotels, right?

Our route took us up through Ontario, Canada and we decided to take a small detour to view Niagara Falls from the Canadian side. We saw the American Falls on our way out to Albany. The view is definitely better from the Canadian side, but it was far more crowded this time around. It was almost impossible to get a decent shot and really none of mine do the falls justice.

 

After viewing the falls, we stayed in Canada for a few hours of extremely boring driving. I'm serious- you could show me a photo of rural Ontario or a picture of rural Ohio and I wouldn't know the difference. We then crossed back into the U.S. through the border of Michigan. We drove along Lake Huron for quite some time, working our way northwest to the Upper Peninsula. We drove across the Mackinac Bridge, which happens to be the world's third largest suspension bridge. (Fun fact!) We arrived at St. Ignace around 8pm.

Gavin was psyched to be out of the car and able to run free for a while. St. Ignace seems to be a very small town but it has a gorgeous lighthouse and walkway that overlooks Lake Huron. I told Adam I was shocked at how much the lake looks like an ocean because it's so large. He made some wise-ass remark about them being called "great lakes" for a reason. Whatever!

 

Running and having fun after a very long day. These kids were unbelievably good in the car. Tomorrow we are going to spend most of our day playing along the upper peninsula of Michigan. We have plans to visit several parks and beaches. We have only planned to spend about 3 hours driving tomorrow but if we find ourselves up for driving more in the afternoon, we may try to make it a ways into Minnesota. If not, we'll stay in Marquette. 

This was tonight's sunset in St. Ignace. I am seconds from going to sleep and I am sure this post is filled with typos. I don't have the energy to edit tonight so I will just apologize for said typos. It was a long day but we feel great about getting so far. We'll see what tomorrow brings and where we end up! Good night!