In the summer of 2003 we took a family vacation to Michigan. We decided to drive there and took our time. The vacation lasted 3 weeks, and it took us 5 days to drive there and 5 days to drive back. We took a lot of back roads and didn't spend a lot of time on freeways.
The trip began innocently enough. However, it quickly went downhill. We were driving on the freeway at night, about an hour outside Casper, Wyoming. I probably wasn't saying as much attention as I should have, but I would swear there weren't any signs warning me. Anyway, while we were cruising along at 75 or 80 miles per hour the freeway turned into a dirt road. When it happened I started skidding and came close to losing control - it was quite scary! There was a lot of dust and in the dark it was hard to see the road. Fortunately there was a semi in front of us and we were able to follow the tail lights.
We arrived at our hotel late at night, and it wasn't the best hotel. We put up with it, though. The next day we drove to Mount Rushmore and got a flat tire about a half-hour from our destination. I had anticipated this possibility and bought a new lug wrench from Sears before the trip began. Unfortunately I hadn't actually tried to use the lug wrench, and it didn't fit. We didn't have a cell phone signal, and I was considering climbing a nearby hill to see if I could get a signal when some people pulled up behind us. They were very helpful. They didn't have the right tools, so they drove to a nearby town and got them (they were locals). When they got back I offered to help them change the tire, but they just did it for me, it was pretty cool.
With our spare tire we drove to Mt. Rushmore, then to our hotel. I took our tire to Wal-mart to get it repaired, but we found out the rim was cracked (probably from our dirt road freeway adventure the night before). So we found ourselves in Rapid City, South Dakota on a Saturday night (during the Sturgis biker convention, no less) facing the prospect of driving across several very boring states at 55 miles per hour.
The next morning I started making phone calls to try to find a wheel. None of the tire stores carried the wheel size we needed. So I started calling any car-related business I found in the phone book. One person happened to live in a trailer park, and one of his neighbors had a large variety of used wheels in his yard. He happened to find one with the right lug nut pattern. It wasn't the exact size we needed, but it did the job and we were able to resume our trip. We ended up keeping that wrong-sized tire on the car for a number of years.
Our next stop was in Aberdeen, South Dakota. We arrived at our hotel and were impressed by the nice looking lobby. We got our room key and drove to the back of the hotel. Unfortunately the rest of the hotel was quite different from the lobby. We walked in and were hit with a blast of hot, humid air because the air conditioning units from the rooms were blowing hot air into the large indoor area we were in. There was also a seedy looking casino in the hotel. We opened the door to our room and discovered that it was a smoking room, so I went back to the lobby and asked for a different one.
This time we got a room next to the world's loudest ice machine. The walls were pretty thin and it was like being next to a construction site. After a few minutes my wife said she couldn't take it anymore, so we asked for our money back and went to the Comfort Inn next door. It was a significant improvement! I have always been very picky about hotels since that time, there are chains I will trust and chains I refuse to stay at (Shilo, Ramada and Motel 6 fall into that latter category).
My son was about 18 months old on that trip and he had just started walking. Every time we stopped for gas or a bathroom break we let him out of the car to walk around and stretch his legs. After a day or two of the same routine he decided he had had enough of riding in the car and fought us whenever we tried to put him back in his car seat.
We made our way to Iron Mountain, Michigan (it took us 5 days to get there from Utah), and stayed there for a few days, then we drove to Mackinac Island, which is between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. No cars are allowed on the island, so travel is typically done on foot, with bikes or in horse-drawn carriages. The only way to get to the island is by ferry boat. I was there with my brother-in-law he is about 7 years younger than me) and we decided one night to walk around the island. We didn't know how large the island was, but we found our when we got back to our hotel around 1:30am that it is 9 or 10 miles in circumference. I remember there being a lot of bats, they would fly really close to us but turn away at the last second.
The rest of that trip wasn't too bad; we went out of our way to stay in nicer hotels on the way home and avoided the biker convention on the way home. We found an antiques store in Sioux City, Iowa that my wife really liked and other than a Pizza Hut in Ogalala, Nebraska that was 55 degrees in the middle of summer the trip home was uneventful (although it took another 5 days and we were very tired by the time it was all over).
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