After spending a weekend with Hannah, Darian, Coen and Ruthie we headed north of Detroit and followed roads that took us along the eastern coast of Michigan along Lake Huron.  We had armed ourselves with many real estate listings—both for sale and for rent —at many small towns along the coast.  We went to Port Huron, Port Austin, Frankenmuth, Zilwaukee, Bay City, then straight south to Jackson, Chelsea, Dexter, Ann Arbor, and Ypsilanti.  After that we decided to go back north to the shores of Lake Michigan and toured Traverse City and Petoskey.  I liked that area best, but the humidity was debilitating and I feel like almost every campground we found was dripping with rain and full of mud puddles.  Eventually we decided that living in Michigan was not for us.  What we considered “small towns” were actually “villages”, some without even a grocery store.  Other towns were too big for us, filled with people and lots of cars.  I don’t want to put down Michigan, but the drivers there seemed very aggressive on the road and one driver yelled at us for coming to Michigan to litter and said we should have stayed in California.  I was actually guilty of littering, although I didn’t think of it that way at the time.  I was brushing out my hair and tossed a few hairs from the brush out the window.  This guy pulled up beside us at a stoplight and let me have it, shaking his finger at me with a very mean look.  You can bet I won’t be doing that again.

We spent a total of 18 days touring around Michigan.  I had never seen the Great Lakes, so that was wonderful, and Hannah and Darian took us sightseeing around Detroit.  It was great to see them in their new house.  Now I can picture their new daily lives in Detroit.