Day One: On the Road

When Kelli first suggested Michigan as a summer vacation destination this year, I was a little skeptical. Since Spring Break, she had been stuck on the idea of Myrtle Beach, SC and her idea of Michigan seemed out of left field to me. She talked about sandy beaches and clear blue water and my mind was registering an error. Michigan?

We had a one-week window of opportunity, the week after my summer classes ended. We began planning and I began researching and was pleasantly shocked. Come to find out, Michigan has a lot to offer!

Itinerary in hand, hotels booked, Denny and Carol's Honda Pilot locked and loaded, we set out north for Michigan at 8:30 am last Monday morning.

These are two of the few shots of Charly and Hayes sleeping on the 10 1/2 hour drive to Mackinaw City, MI. Denny and Carol's Pilot has a DVD player and they graciously offered to let us drive the vehicle. They were thinking of the storage and of keeping Charly entertained. It paid off huge in the end! However in 10 1/2 hours of driving, Charly slept for maybe an hour and watched 6 of the 8 movies we had packed! We need to upgrade vehicles now, because Charly won't know how to travel without a DVD player.

Hayes was a trooper! For a kid who can't sit still, he was an incredible traveler. We only had to really stop twice. He watched movies along with Charly. He took short naps. He played with toys and crayons. He dropped things on purpose and yelled until Kelli picked them up!

We swung off the interstate through Green Bay to catch a glimpse of historic Lambeau Field. Lambeau was a weird site. It's an impressively large NFL stadium, home of one of the most popular teams in the NFL, in a community of only 100,000 people, easily accessed right off an interstate, surrounded by nothing but parking lots and small houses. If the Patriots play in Lambeau sometime soon, I now know how easy it is to get to the stadium!

We supplied the kids with new snacks and drinks, put in a new movie, and hit the road out of Green Bay. The rest of the drive was awesome! I always envisioned driving south out of Cedar Falls, through Chicago, under Lake Michigan, and then up to the northern part of Michigan. But Mapquest and our GPS (named "Mandy") suggested starting north through Wisconsin and Michigan. This route was almost entirely along Lake Michigan. From Green Bay onward, Lake Michigan was just 20 feet or so outside Kelli's passenger-side window. Charly loved seeing the water. Iowa was all cornfield. Wisconsin all hills. Michigan was proving to be all trees and water.

We were excited to see some lighthouses on our trip and planned on seeing a few specific ones, but about an hour and a half away from Mackinaw City, we came upon the very small town of Manistique, MI and this site . . .

I really wanted to keep driving. But the kiddos were in desperate need of energy-release. So we stopped and let them run wild. The view was great, the sand was soft, but the weather was cold and windy! And the waves were crashing so hard we had to practically shout at each other!

Hayes found a stick (his favorite thing) and plenty of birds to point at (his second favorite thing) and Charly found plenty of rocks (her favorite things) so the kids thought the beach in Manistique was the coolest rest stop ever! We let them run and dig and we snapped some photos and before long, we hit the road again. The sun had shone itself and we wanted to cross The Mighty Mack before dusk. 

We pulled a nice couple aside and asked them to snap a photo of us. If it wasn't for the wind and Charly's Rapunzel-like hair, it would have been a great shot. In fact, most of the family pictures we asked strangers to snap for us turned out great over the course of the week!

We weren't thinking about a time-zone switch, so when we made it to The Mighty Mack before it was completely dark, we thought we were doing good. Once we crossed the 5-mile long beast of a suspension bridge, we realized we lost an hour of time traveling east! Instead of 8:30, it was 9:30 in Mackinaw City.

The Mackinac Bridge is the 10th longest suspension bridge in the world. In the US, it only trails the Lower New York Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco be a matter of mere feet. The total length of the bridge over water is 5 miles while the length of the longest span of suspended part (the part held up by suspension cable), is over 1.25 miles. We were excited and anxious to cross the bridge since it took us directly into Mackinaw City, the first stop of our vacation and was suspended over so much water. To tell the truth, the bridge wasn't the least bit scary, even though there was road construction taking place. With four lanes, you could hardly tell you were even going over water, but the two massive towers took our breath away as we passed under them. It was rather impressive.

 

We arrived at our hotel and gave the kids baths before bed. We ordered a ridiculously overpriced pizza as a late-night snack and hit the hay. Day one, over 11 hours on the road (including stops), in the books.