Pam and Mario's Epic Adventure

Welcome to our RV travel blog! 

We were so excited and a little frightened too when we left Salisbury on July 23rd.  Do we have everything?  Is the trailer hooked up correctly?  Did we tie up all the loose ends back home?  After months of obsessing about all of these things, we drove off into our wild adventure.
We drove.....well MARIO drove....much of that day and arrived at our first rv campground in Buffalo, NY to spend the night and continued on the next day to Michigan, in a town just outside of Ann Arbor.  This was to be our home for the next 4 nights.  We visited with Mario's cousins and aunt and had a wonderful time at their home on a lake.  Michigan is FULL of gorgeous lakes.  
The next day we enjoyed all of the festivities put on for Mario's 50th high school reunion from Ann Arbor Pioneer High School.  Part of the festivities included tours of "The Big House", the University of Michigan Football Stadium....with a capacity of 109 thousand.  We got to walk on the playing field and toured the sacred locker rooms where we saw football jerseys from previous players.  President Gerald Ford's jersey was one of them. 

 The reunion was lots of fun.....the class of 1964 looks AMAZING!  There was an ongoing large slideshow with cool black and whites from "back in the day" and music from "back in the day" playing all night.  And to think, a skinny little Diana Ross was growing up about 30 minutes from their school and just beginning to be seen locally.
The next day we had a lovely brunch with Mario's high school/college friends, most of whom are also retired teachers, and we all made plans to hopefully continue to meet up for other adventures.  
The following morning we headed out for our next big stop 5 hours further north to a lovely place called Petoskey, Michigan.  This is to be our home for the next 4 nights. From here we visited a place called Sleeping Bear Dunes, a national lake shore which was voted the most beautiful place in America on Good Morning America last year. There is a Native American legend of how it got its name.  It tells about a mother bear who lost her 2 cubs, which later became the 2 islands seen from the dunes.  The dune is the mother bear.   It is a gorgeous place with breathtaking vistas of the beautiful Lake Michigan and all of the little coves and inlets, plus the ginormous dunes left over from the glaciers. 

Petoskey is also famous for the famous Petoskey Stones, the state rock of Michigan. They are the fossilized remains of the coral that used to be in Lake Michigan when it was filled with salt water.  Very cool!

my new petoskey stone

North Michigan is also famous for cherry orchards.  This is Cherry Land for sure. Roadside stands selling cherries and everything cherry.  Cherry festivals!  Trees loaded with ruby red cherries as far as the eye can see.  
The town names here are fun and interesting to read.  Names like Kalamazoo and Cheboygan.  We see many Native American names and many tribes live here.  The Chippewa tribe and the Odawa, which we learned is the actual tribal spelling for Ottawa, are both local to this area. 

 As we were driving north we passed this sign that we were at the 45 parallel between the equator and North Pole.  
We are now preparing to head WAYYY up north to the wilds of the Upper Peninsula to have more exciting adventures.  TTFN.