USA – Final Push to Michigan

Chicago

The day began with birds chirping and the sky ablaze with color.  A great way to welcome us to another day of driving and the final push to Michigan.  There is no real way to get to where we needed to go except driving smack dab in the middle of Chicago.

Chicago is a beautiful city, however when you are driving an RV and towing a car, the freeways seem a little daunting.  I planned to arrive in the “slack” of mid-afternoon traffic (coming after the morning rush and before the evening traffic hours) and it worked to our advantage.

There was traffic, of course, but not too bad.  Eventually, we made it past the hustle and bustle of Chicago and were immediately welcomed to Michigan, with some of the worst roads we have driven on thus far.

Seriously, the entry into the Michigan Welcome Center has so many potholes, I thought we may be lost in the pits of eternal doom.

As we drove northeast, we saw our first Amish carriage, which we thought was pretty cool.

Trader Joe’s

Melissa and I are die-hard Trader Joe’s shoppers, so Melissa looked at her iPhone and pulled up the nearest one.  We decided to make a pit stop at the Grand Rapids location and we were so glad we did.  We piled the fresh food into our carts and loaded up on all of our favorite foods.

There are certain things at Trader Joe’s that you can’t get anywhere else and we were in heaven.

University of Central Michigan

After shopping in a little piece of nirvana, we headed back out on the road and eventually pulled in to Mount Pleasant, where our daughter, Kayla is going to Central Michigan University.

We called her and she was just going in to her last class of the year.  She said she would meet us after her class and we were so excited.  We decided to do some last minutes shopping at Walmart (which has the largest parking lots and is great for a rig of our size) and I got a haircut.

Kayla finished her class and she was free at last!  No more school for an entire summer.  Okay, not totally true, she’s taking some online summer classes.

I’m going to boast for a minute here.  We are so proud of our kids.  William (one year older than Kayla) is going into his senior year at University of California Irvine (UCI) and both he and Kayla have been on the Dean’s List (the good kind 🙂 for their excellent GPA’s.  They are both so self-disciplined and doing so well.  Next year, Kayla will be the President of one of her clubs, which is another honor.

Well, we traveled across the country and we finally got to hug our daughter.  We were all so excited and we couldn’t stop smiling.  It was a surreal feeling to be in the Soaring Eagle Casino parking lot reconnecting with our daughter, but with the sun setting the sky ablaze in the background, we couldn’t ask for anything more.

The next day we helped to move Kayla out of her dorm (apartment next year!) and we piled all of her belongings into Bertha (her mini-van).  We took off, with Kayla driving behind us, to Traverse City, Michigan.

Kayla’s mom and step-dad recently relocated to Traverse City from San Diego.  After our 10 days with Kayla, she will spend the rest of the summer at this new lovely home.

Check out our Next Blog Post USA – Michigan… Yay!