October 24 - Drive to Detroit, Michigan

Given the lack of sleep, I was a little tired when we arose and packed up the trailer for the drive thru Detroit. Fortunately the temps had stayed above 32 so the water lines weren’t frozen shut—I had also worried about disconnecting them if they froze. We saw the sun trying to break thru the clouds, so I grabbed the camera and we hustled down to the lake to take some “sunrise over the lake” pictures. That delayed breakfast a bit, but we still got off by shortly after 9 o’clock. The drive south along the eastern edge of the thumb gave us continual views of the fading fall colors and occasional glimpses of Lake Huron to the east. The ship traffic seemed to be more constant on Lake Huron than on Lake Michigan, but that’s just my impression.

At Port Huron we followed an alternate route to I94/I69 advertised by the State of Michigan. It added at least 10 miles to our travels since we ended up taking three sides of a rectangle. My advice to anyone else would be to ignore “alternate routes” that the State of Michigan proposes unless they specify how long these alternates will be. Due to this crazy routing, we also ended up on the wrong side of I-69 and then had to backtrack a couple of exits to take I-94 south. Very frustrating!

Monika took over for the drive thru Detroit to our campsite at the Wayne County Fairgrounds, which was about 10 southwest of Dearborn. We chose it because it was the closest campground we could find to Greenfield Village, which was the final stop planned for this trip. We were both surprisingly tired after the 3 hour drive, so after lunch Monika played on the computer and I took a nap. I finally had enough energy later to make a storage brace for the dulcimer and install more blind-spot mirrors on the truck, hoping for better vision backwards on both sides of the trailer. We shopped at the Wal-Mart conveniently located just across the back fence from our campground, had a light dinner, and played some cribbage before turning in for the night. I had a “bad card night”, which is somewhat like a bad hair day only different, and Monika took both games for a Coordinated Cribbage Contest (CCC) of 6 to 8—not that I’m keeping score or anything.