Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Welcome back, folks. Parts of today (hours and hours of phone negotiations) were awful. Parts of today were okay (visiting Niagara Falls but failing to avoid multiple gift shops. Parts of today were wonderful (arriving at a friend's house for dinner and kid play time). But the best part of today was when the service manager at an RV repair business said, "we've fixed the slide and we're almost done with the bed." Let's break that down a bit. On Tuesday, we left a beautiful lake-front campground and drove from Munising, on the upper peninsula of Michigan, to Port Huron, north of Detroit and near the border with Canada. Before we hit the highway, we made a brief visit to Munising Falls Visitor Center in Picture Rocks National Lakeshore. There's a short (800') hike to the visitor center there. Site A79, in case you happen to be in Munising. Elise getting in a beachfront workout while the kids feed the birds. Munising Falls The drive ...

I wrote a couple of short posts about certain days during our two-week stay in Iron River, WI but I feel impelled to reflect on that time. It was exquisitely vacation-like and it will make me happy in the future to remember the things that created this. Let's do this Letterman style: #10: Hayward, WI Sometimes you need something to do. The kids are getting rammy. The house is feeling small. The weather isn't what you hoped. So we hopped in the car and drove about an hour to Hayward to see the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and a small-town amusement center. We skipped the latter and instead spent quite a bit of time on main street shopping, eating ice cream, eating dinner and also enjoying a small little city park along the river. Elise, Ali, Cate and Henry in the mouth of the worlds largest Muskie. This gave us the chance to see the banner advertising the lumberjack world championships later that week. This was an unexpected highlight of the trip so far. Hayward...

Dear Reader, Having successfully broken the streak of consecutive daily posts, my attention turned to the looming milestone: one month on the road. I'm writing on Sunday, July 21. We left Portland on Sunday, June 23. In case you've forgotten, that was spent approximately one week on Whidney Island, one week driving to Minnesota and the last two weeks with Elise's parents in Duluth. This past week was camp for all four kids. Lily and Henry went to an overnight camp on Sturgeon Lake, about an hour's drive south the city. Ali and Cate went to day camp, also offered by the Duluth YMCA. Among other things, this meant that Elise and I got to disappear for 24 hours up the North Shore of Lake Superior. For a moment, I need to tell a story from almost two years ago in order to explain why we're doing what we're doing this summer. First of all, we have been talking about doing this trip for several years. In the fall of 2017 we (the two of us) went to Italy for two ...