2019 was a great travel year, but it wasn’t a very RV-intensive travel year. 2020 should see us back to exploring the US and a bit of Canada with the trailer in tow, though.
The working title of our big summer trip this year is “Less Baseball, More Lakes.” Originally it was supposed to involve a whole bunch of baseball games/stadiums, but it’s involved over time to instead involve some baseball and a whole lot of Michigan and the Great Lakes. We’ve wanted to see Michigan for awhile now, and we wanted something a little closer to home than our last few summer trips so that we could keep it somewhat shorter (we’re doing about 5 weeks this year, versus 8ish on our last 2 big RV trips) to save some money and also to keep part of the summer open for other things (music camp for Milo, maybe a job for Ari during his summer break, etc.)
I don’t have any pictures of Michigan to share, because I haven’t been except for a very short trip to Detroit a couple of decades ago, but I need to have some pictures in this post, and Ari changed planes in Detroit once, so here’s a picture from the airport:
We won’t likely be visiting the Detroit airport this summer, but here’s a rough outline of what we will be doing:
The beginning of the trip is a bit up in the air, because we don’t know yet if Dave will be doing AP grading early in the summer. If he doesn’t, we may leave a couple of days earlier and fit in some time near Cleveland. But as it stands now, our plan is to spend a couple of days in Cincinnati and then head up to Niagara Falls for another short stop. Then our first baseball game will be in Toronto. We carefully arranged the schedule so that we can go to a Blue Jays-Angels game and see Mike Trout play. Turns out the Angels are actually playing the Braves in Atlanta this year, so we could have made this part easier by just staying home. But that’s no fun.
Here is a picture of baseball:
We only have two nights in Toronto, and then we head to Detroit for a few days. The main things I want to see in and around Detroit are the Diego Rivera murals in the art museum and the Henry Ford. I was fretting a bit about how expensive the Henry Ford is, but then I found a Black Friday sale on memberships, so I grabbed one for, I believe, less than it would cost us all to get in one day. This way we’ll spend two days there without worrying about the price.
After Detroit, we head toward the Upper Peninsula, where we’ll spend the bulk of our Michigan time, with stops in Sault Ste Marie (we’ll be there 4th of July weekend, and I just snagged one of the last available waterfront sites at a campground where we should be able to watch both boats and fireworks from our site), Taquamenon Falls State Park, Houghton and the Keweenaw Peninsula and maybe the Porcupine Mountains on a day trip, Marquette and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, and Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island (I scored half price ferry tickets during a Black Friday sale, too).
Then we start heading toward home again, with a few days in Traverse City and Sleeping Bear Dunes. The last few days were hard to figure out, but I think we’ve settled on stopping by Detroit and/or Ann Arbor again for a couple of days to see anything we missed (or go to the Henry Ford again!), maybe a stop at the Airstream factory for a tour en-route to another Cincinnati stop (we just bought a FMCA membership, so we can stay 2 nights a month FREE at their campground in Cincinnati) and then we’re thinking of Knoxville as our final stop.
Phew! The itinerary is kind of modeled after our Nova Scotia trip that we loved so much–lots of mid length stays (mostly 3 and 4 nights) in small towns and cities not too far away from each other. We really enjoyed both the pace and the small towns and cities of that trip. We also focused pretty heavily on places where we could ride bikes somewhere directly from the campground this year, since we’ve come to discover that we love being able to bike places but don’t so much love loading all the bikes up onto the van and taking them somewhere. We should have easy access to bike paths from the campgrounds in Traverse City, Marquette, Houghton, and Mackinaw City, at least…maybe some I’m forgetting about.
Here’s a Great Lake (Lake Erie, to be precise):
Aside from this trip, we anticipate the usual impossibility of doing many weekend trips owing to the kids’ busy activity schedules. But we do have a long weekend in Montgomery, Alabama booked to see the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Milo and Gus are reading a lot of Shakespeare this year).
We’re going to try to make it to at least one Rome Braves game again this year, too, particularly since I see how much everyone enjoyed it last year, based on its high travel highlights ranking.
Milo will be doing district honors band in Blue Ridge, Georgia in February, which is just far enough away that we probably need to stay overnight somewhere. I’m a little nervous about taking the trailer into the mountains that time of year (and Dave likely won’t be able to come for all of it, since it starts on a Thursday), so that will probably involve an Airbnb or something instead.
We’re hoping to make it to St. Augustine for our post-Christmas trip this year; fingers crossed that I can get a reservation at Anastasia State Park when they open up.
Aside from that, everything is up in the air. It will be time to dive into college visits again in the fall, with Milo this time, so we’ll see where we end up for those. And we’ll try to fit more weekend trips in here and there, but I know better than to count on them actually happening.
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