Toward Detroit

I absolutely scrambled Thursday evening to pull it off (with a lot of help from my parents), but when I went to bed that night our car was ready for the first leg of our road trip: St. Louis to Detroit. We left first thing Friday morning.

The drive took 9 hours. We stopped three times, and the total time we spent NOT driving was about 30 minutes. The kids were great. Like I said, they're excellent travel buddies.

Along the way we saw a lot of farmland. The road to Detroit took us diagonally across Illinois, through the northwest corner of Indiana, and then nearly laterally across most of the state of Michigan.

We were still in Illinois when I took this picture. Apart from the windmills, most of Illinois looks just like this. The windmills are unusual, and I wonder if there will be more views like this one in the future. I'm still not clear on what our future energy production will look like.

Here's another notable sight from the drive: actual construction workers! Along the way I lost count of the number of times a lane or two was closed for roadwork, but only once or twice was there anyone actually doing anything. We didn't have any significant construction-related delays, thank goodness.

The GPS did a great job. It got us to our hotel and I had almost no trouble with it during all the highway transitions. Meanwhile, the portable DVD player kept the kids happy (or the road-trip equivalent of happy) for the entire trip.

This was waiting for us at the hotel. 

It was so thoughtful--a gift basket from the Bride's family with treats made by Matthew's Aunt Beth, toys & games for the girls, chocolates, and a cute little "wedding day necessities" kit--Kleenex, a travel size stain-stick, and breath mints, and more things I'm sure I've forgotten to list.