Day #1 - Saturday, September 19th, 2009

This was the "day of the Long Drive". Despite Marissa's mutterings about "crack of dawn" we were in fact fully packed up & ready to start rolling dead on 7:00 AM, which literally was at dawn, so much so that we actually stopped alongside the airport to take a picture of the pink sky over the fields. John took the first leg and all went well to and around Indianapolis, then (always a surprise) we drove due East for the first bit of I-69, squinting into the sun. We stopped at a MacDonald's for breakfast burritos, hash browns and coffee & Zoe had a chance to relive herself. We carried on and around 9:30 AM pulled into a Rest Area for a leg stretch and to change drivers. It was bright and sunny, but the temperature was still in the 50's F.

Zoe was behaving beautifully, mostly sleeping peacefully in her bed. We started listening to "Wife for Hire" by Janet Evanovich, a book on CD. By 10:30 we had crossed into Michigan, and by 11:30 we were closing in on Lansing and pulled into a large Rest Area/Welcome Center. We elected to eat lunch there, and take a bit of a break, since we had conveniently parked about 10 feet from a picnic table.

Side note - we decided a better name for Marissa's Tom-Tom GPS would be "Portia", since we both said, more than once "shut up, Portia" (an inside family joke started by Maria) whenever she told us off for not choosing to follow her directions. By the end of Marissa's stint we had considerably improved on Portia's estimate of our arrival time.

John drove around Lansing & on up through the one section of the trip that was not "Interstate" highway, and in Mount Pleasant we decided to replenish the 3/4 tank of gas we had consumed and change drivers again. During this next leg Zoe was finding this long drives with short stops in strange places a bit of a strain, and wound up spending a long time on John's lap.

At the penultimate Rest Area prior to the Mackinac Bridge we changed drivers again, so that Marissa could get the maximum enjoyment out of her first crossing of Big Mac, although we did slip into the last Reast Area as John had remembered it provided a great scenic overlook of the countryside. There are some small signs of color, but rather less than we had hoped to see. We crossed the bridge in bright sunshine, and in a gap between traffic so we did not need to hurry.

Once over we quickly slipped down to St Ignace, which was in chaos, due to the heavy truck gathering this weekend. We followed many detour signs around the neighborhoods (much to Portia's chagrin!), but we finally put back on the main road less than 1/4 mile before our hotel, arriving at 4:30 PM. The hotel was ideal. The van was parked 10 feet from the front door to our room, and the back (patio) door opened on to a covered patio followed by 20 feet of soft sand to the edge of Lake Huron & a view of the Islands. Shortly after arriving we were sitting on our patio, drinking tea!

In view of the chaos in town, we elected to have a pizza, etc delivered to our room by somewhere that said they could get there. It was very good. Meanwhile we looked at the day's pictures, and Marissa uploaded many to Flickr and also to her blog, despite the rather slow Internet connection. Later we decided to take Zoe for a walk, at around dusk and noticed people setting up chairs along the street. Inquiries revealed that we were on the parade route of the 100-odd semi-trucks that participated in the ceremonial bridge crossing. With walk completed, we grabbed our chairs from the van and joined them, chatting with all and sundry (Zoe is a great ice-breaker). The temperature was quite cool, so we armed ourselves with free coffee, a blanket and put Zoe in her brand new fleece sweater - very stylish! Eventually they arrived, very colorful (but hard to photograph) and very, very noisy as they were all blowing their air horns - Zoe was positively quaking in fright at first. We wouldn't have missed it for the world, but have agreed that "once is enough"! As peace returned we went back to the room and uploaded and blogged such pictures as were usable. Finally, exhausted from a long day, we collapsed into bed. Our milage for the day (and trip) was 531.

Pictures from the first half of the day on Marissa's blog are here.

Pictures from the "truck parade" on Marissa's blog are here.