Leaving Michigan is hard to do.

No I don't mean that it's hard to leave all our Michigan friends and family behind or that the resort has been so relaxing that we're going to miss it or that the chilly,wet weather is bringing the beautiful fall colors matched only by New England.

No what I mean is we were taking the rig in for new shocks and it failed to start, plenty of battery but no spark to the engine. I start the rig every two weeks during the summer and let it run up to operating temperature but this morning nothing. OK time to give Good Sam road service a call and get a little service for my money, after about ten minutes on the phone with them and they had a tow truck on the way. We're in the middle of no where so the truck had to come from about 30 miles away, and then tow the motor home about 20 miles to where we were having the work done. It would have been about a $300 tow but Good Sam took care of it.

We started out with a bad Mass Sensor, whatever that is, they replaced it and it started right up, once. Fortunately Cathy and I were going to spend a few days at the kids house doing Football and Volley ball events with them, . Turned out to also have a bad fuel pump, it appears that the motor home company put in an extension on the wiring harness back to the fuel pump, problem was they didn't use the proper gauge wire which caused it to burn out. No I'm not going to mention Thor Corporations, Four Winds Five Thousand motor home. Once they found out that the extension was the cause and that it was bad they started looking for a new one when one of the mechanics noticed that the original wire harness was long enough to reach without the extension.  I love how the pump is in the gas tank so they had to drop the tank to replace it, labor was 4 times the amount of the pump.

We were still at the kids when they called so the next morning I left there at 6:30am drove 130 miles to the RV Center, while I was checking out they pointed out that I had a bad bulge in the right front tire. I only have about 25000 miles on them but they're pushing 6 yrs old so my next stop was the tire shop, a couple hours there and I was ready to head back to the resort and set up the rig. After that it was a simply 110 mile drive back to the kids,just in time to shower eat dinner and go to the volleyball games.

Two more days of kids volleyball and football, and now we're back at the resort relaxing for the day, watching OUR LIONS go 4 & 0, Tomorrow we'll be closing up shop here and packing everything and then hitting the road Tuesday.. We hope.

Michigan State Museum

Started out early to make a road trip to the Meijers Garden in Grand Rapids Michigan,about half way there the clouds moved in and the rains started. Not a good day for the gardens but a rainy day is always good for genealogy research, so we made a right turn and headed for Lansing and the State library and Archives. Cathy is big on genealogy and I really don't care about it unless she finds someone that was very rich, so while she was in the archives I went to the state museum which is in the same building.

I've been here at least a dozen times but I always spot something that I never noticed before, there were no school buses in the parking lot so I knew it would be quiet today.

The museum covers the entire history of Michigan and it would fill a lot of pages so I'm just going to post a few pictures.

The first thing you see when you get off the elevator, the Old's Museum is a few miles from here.

There is a section about the building of BIG MAC or as we call it in Michigan The BRIDGE.

This is a piece of Float Copper from the U.P. , it's 8 foot by 4 foot and weights about 4000 lbs and is 99.9 percent pure copper

Of course they have to have a section on the auto industry

Every time I round the corner and see this beautiful 57 Corvette, it reminds me of my very first car.  It was red too.

The sticker price on the car was $3450.00

One of the great things about growing up in Detroit was MOTOWN, we had some of the greatest music in the country right in our backyard and they all preformed every chance they had.  Any kind of a festival or fair they were there and most of the time it was FREE.  You could go to the State Fair and in one day see at least 5 headliners on stage.

My favorite and the love of my youth, Diana Ross, during my teens a probably saw her perform 25 times.

And this is who every Detroit kid wanted to grow up a be, Al Kaline, Mr Tiger.  A kid I went to High School with lived next door to Mr Kaline so I was fortunate enough to have met him quite a few times.

Date Line  1957

Anybody that follows football knows that we may never see this headline again.

Just a pretty stained glass window I liked.

I didn't realize until I got home and started looking at the pictures, what a great trip I was able to take down memory lane.

Guess I'm a little glad it rained today.

Just stuff

I just noticed that it's been over 6 weeks since I posted a Blog.  It's not that I've been to busy, it's just that we haven't done that much since we got back to Michigan.

We ended June at the kids house, I had to drive the grandson back and forth to Driver Training class for a week, then we had two days back at the park before we were back at the kids to House/Pet sit for 8 days while they went north to a family reunion week over the fourth of July.  It was during that heat wave so we had free air conditioning for the whole time.  

This is the little girl that we were taking care of while House sitting

An aerial  view of our park, we're the little red squiggly line near the lower center.

Lighthouse Village Resort, Homer Michigan, 780 membership sites and 10 Coast to Coast sites. 

About 10 days to ourselves at the park doing this and that, cleaning stuff,cutting the grass, working on the garden, fixing things breaking things and watching Tiger Baseball, we're in first place.  Then it was back to the kids house to again House/Pet sit for 9 days while they were of in the Boston area for a little road trip.  They hit Niagara Falls, West Pointe Academy, Salem, Mystic and Boston Massachusetts. They went to a Red Sox game, hugged the Green Monster, did a Segway tour of Boston, went whale watching and a ton more things that I can't think of.

We spotted this one in a Walmart's in Battle Creek, Michigan I was really hoping that it had a For Sale sign on it since it looks like it still has a lot of life left in it.

I tried to explain to them that Cathy and I are the retired ones with a motor home and that we're the ones that should be doing all the running around and that they should stay home and go to work everyday.  But since it was the two hottest parts of the summer so far the free A/C made up for it.

Down by the dock

 

Hopefully next week we'll get over to the Lake Michigan side to tour a garden we've been wanting to see for a couple of years , if we do you'll probably hear about it.