Extended Drive to Michigan

27 – 28 March 2025

Even though we’ve determined that April isn’t really an idea time to travel (at least locally), it still feels wrong to not do something for Birthday/Anniversary week.  I took part of the week off, but have to work a bit in the middle, so this year’s trip is a bit early, but Matt found a butterfly exhibit in Michigan that looks pretty cool and is within driving distance, so that’s what we’ll be basing this year’s trip around!

Within driving distance is actually more like within driving distance if we split it into 2 days, so we’ll be spending a day with my parents to break things up a bit.  They usually watch my niece and nephew on Fridays so we planned our trip so we could see them too, but as it turns out, this is spring break for them and they’ve got family plans so we spent a low-key day just hanging out with my parents.

We celebrated an early birthday:

and went for a short hike (which I didn’t take pictures of because I forgot my camera 🙁 ), but here’s me and my mom twinning!

Last time we were in town (for Christmas), she was wearing this cute shirt she had gotten for donating blood.  I wanted one too, so I went and donated the next morning 🙂

29 March 2025

We’ve got a full day of driving ahead of us, but there were DUCKS on our walk yesterday and since we’ll be in the car all day, I wanted to get some movement in, so we stopped back at Centennial Park so I could get a few pictures:

SO

MANY

DUCKS!!!

Most of them were paired up:

But there were some single guys floating around too:

Stretch:

Toes stay out of the water to keep them warm?

This fellow was especially noisy:

Sips of water:

I also spotted this Cedar waxwing:

…and he spotted me…

Road cookies!

Chicago traffic was heavy, as always:

Unfortunately, we hit rain as we were leaving Illinois:

and it followed us all the way to Michigan:

That turn arrow sign looks like it belongs in Super Mario!

Unfortunately, it looks like the weather will be rainy for most of our time here 🙁