Paradise

7-26-2016

All good things must come to an end. After 7,910 miles, 17 states, 11 National Parks, 6 National Monuments, 8 State Parks, 4 Great Lakes, 2 countries, and 34 blog entries, our trip is now over. While our trip was exciting, crazy, beautiful, scary, funny, and even epic at times, nothing beats being home and this trip has helped us appreciate this more than ever. We truly live in paradise. As Dorothy said, "There's no place like home."

Old Friends and HOME!

7-25-16

Today is the final day of our trip. We are so excited to get home. We all can't wait to see Papa, Fundy, the garden, the tree house, our beds, etc. We woke up in Ottawa, Ontario, with a feeling of rising excitement within. After 5 weeks and 2 days of non-stop adventure, we finally would get to return home.

Our route took us right by our old hometown of Georgia, VT, so some of our friends from when we were little gathered with us for lunch. It was great to see everyone. It's been almost 9 years since we lived there. We have all changed so much since we were in play group together, but it's great that we have remained friends.

    

After visiting our friends, we piled back into to the car for the final stretch home. All of us were full of such excitement to get home which was just about 2 hours away. A good audio book helped the time fly by and before we knew it, we were driving up our driveway. Fundy was waiting at the top of the driveway for us - we couldn't get out of the car fast enough to hug her. Everyone had huge smiles splayed across their faces; even Fundy was wiggling her fluff ball of a tail and had her mouth open in the happiest doggy smile.

Next stop was the veggie garden. The whole trip, especially the past week, we have been fretting over the garden's lack of care and could not wait to eat a juicy cherry tomato. When we reached the garden, I couldn't believe the place - it was absolutely booming with life, although not all of it edible. It has been taken over by giant weed trees. Despite the weeds, there is still lots of produce. For dinner, we had zucchini pasta, a cucumber salad, and peas. Our first 2016 garden meal, and it tasted fantastic. We also ran around checking all of our flowers gardens and just couldn't get over how beautiful everything is. Going away helped us to appreciate the paradise in which we live.

Soo Locks

7-24-16

Sault St Marie is home to the busiest locks in the world. There is a 21 foot drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, so a lock system was designed to negotiate this drop. Every day and night, huge freighters, tug boats, and barges use these locks. I didn't quite understand how they worked until I saw them in action.

Unfortunately, we needed to go back to the American side to see the big ships use the locks, so getting back over the border took a while. Luckily, we arrived when a big ship was passing through because there wasn't going to be much action for several hours afterwards. The engineering of the locks is pretty impressive. We got to see them lift a gigantic ship up the 21 ft to Lake Superior just by using water and it's natural flow. After, we checked out a small visitor's center.

The US border patrol told us about the "baby locks" on the Canadian side, so we checked them out after we saw the big ship pass through. It was actually really great that we got to see the smaller locks because we were able to see up close how they worked. We were walk across the gates and really look closer at how the water flowed in and out when a tour boat went through it.

When we were at the baby locks, Maya also got pretty excited because she got a beautiful picture of a cedar waxwing. It only seemed right to make sure it got on the blog.

Seeing the locks took a while (because of the borders) so we didn't get on the road until 12:30 pm and we needed to get all the was to Ottawa, ON for the night which is an 8:30 hrs of driving. It was a big push, but we were really good in the car - audio books help. The drive from Sault Ste Marie to Ottawa felt kind of remote rather than on the Trans Canada Highway. Since it was our 2nd to last day, we talked a lot about the trip with questions like "what was your proudest moment, most difficult moment, most entertaining moment, etc." All of our answers were different which is interesting that we all have had different experiences on the same trip. We got to our destination at 10:30 pm, so we were pretty tired - another full day.

A Big Cousin Hug

DAY 34

Today we visited Judilynn, Jim, and Matthew, our cousins in Appleton, Wisconsin. I'd say it was one of the best parts of the trip for all of us. Judilynn is my mom's cousin and Aunt Judy and Uncle Dave's daughter which makes us all cousins. Try to imagine a 18 hour big,warm hug, and if you can do this, then you know what it'd feel like to stay at Judilynn's place. The food, the beds, the flowers, the smiles, the TLC, it was all perfect. When we arrived, we were welcomed with open arms and you could immediately tell that we were at the right place. 

Even though I have only met my cousins a few times and it was years ago, their kindness made me feel as though I'd known them for years. Judilynn immediately started a much needed load of laundry for us and then we got to the important stuff - eating and connecting.First, we had chips and homemade guacamole. Then we sat down at this beautifully decorated table with lots of shells and candles for dinner. There was pasta salad, pulled pork, caprese salad, rolls and crab cakes. This was a welcome change from Hot Pockets. We dined as we shared about our trip and families, chatted about politics, and got to see pictures of more family.

After dinner, we chatted some more and played Perudo. We would have probably stayed up all night if my mom hadn't said that it was time to go to bed. So we crawled into the most comfortable beds ever and dropped off to sleep. I have been feeling kind of sick, so Judilynn and Matthew gave me lots of sympathy and cough drops.  

In the morning, we had yummy eggs, cinnamon rolls, bacon, blueberries and strawberries. We needed to hit the road again, but I didn't want to leave. Our original departure time was supposed to be 9am, but we stayed until after 11am. After lots of hugs, waving, and honking (per Trino tradition), we left Appleton, WI and headed towards Sault St. Marie, Ontario for the night.

Along the way, we stopped to swim in Lake Michigan. Then we checked out Kitch-iti-kipa (Mirror from Heaven), the largest natural spring in the state. The water was so clear that you could see 45 ft to the bottom as if there wasn't any water. There were huge brown trout swimming around and the springs on the bottom looked like underwater volcanoes. It was pretty cool.

Next, we swam in Lake Huron, near the Macinac Bridge (our 3rd great lake to swim in). We didn't arrive in Sault St Marie until around 9:30pm. We stayed in a historic hotel (it was really cheap), but it smelled like smoke, there was a band that was playing until 2am, there was a shared bathroom, the beds were super uncomfortable (I slept on the floor they were so bad), but the worst was how hot it was. So we hit the hay and tried to sleep.