Day 14

Date: Sunday July 19, 2015

Location at the beginning of the day: Gogebic State Park

Distance to drive: between 600 and 700 km (depending on how the day goes)

Hours to drive: between 6 and 7 hours

Destination: our final stop ended up being 9 Mile Hill rest area in Michigan

Planned activities: drive

Quote of the day: “Krist! Good thing we need gas!”  Check out the picture of the gas stations (I don't have time to post the picture right now.  Krist is a gas station chain. Someday I will update this post with the picture.)

We bid goodbye to Gogebic State Park.  We will miss the view, but I think that we have donated plenty of blood.  Good thing the wedding isn’t for a couple of weeks because my legs are covered in bites and both of my girls have them pretty much everywhere including their faces.

We were on the road by about 11:45am.  I passed the girls their present bags (each day we travel the girls get some new or borrowed books and a little activity to keep them busy) and they were happy.  I decided that now that my speech for the wedding is complete and my blog entries are up to date, I could work on my knitting project.  I will need three balls of yarn to complete the project and I am about ¾ of the way through the first ball.   I was a hoping to complete the project on the road trip, but I have lots of time.  I am not going to share with you what I am making because it is a present and I want it to be a surprise.  I figured I would finish my row and then take a picture of my progress.  I have been trying to take a picture after each day I work on it.  Three stitches in I saw a loop off the side multiple rows down.  Oh no I dropped a stitch (or something like that)!  I don’t really know because I am not much of a knitter.  I have yet to complete knitting project and the furthest I have even gotten is the scarf that I started knitting while on strike.  I have discovered that knitting is very therapeutic.  You can still carry on a conversation, while knitting.  Most importantly when sitting around for long lengths of time you can feel like you have accomplished something.  Back to the dropped stitch: I know that my mom or other avid knitters would take out their needles and have the problem solved within minutes.  I am not an expert knitter.  In the past, if I have made a mistake, I have stopped and taken it to my mom to help me fix it.  If I opted for that I would be waiting a week and a half before I could knit again.  I decided to try to fix the problem by myself.  Well… four 60-stitch rows and an hour an half later (I took off one stitch at a time to make sure that I didn’t drop any stitches), I discovered that the yarn had split and that the loop was actually only half a stitch.  The important part is that I managed to fix the problem and by the end of the day I was further along then when I started. 

Chad and I are now finishing my birthday bottle of wine and sorting out the details for tomorrow.  Two more driving days before we reach our furthest destination and we get to rest in Waterloo with Chad’s cousins for a few days first.  It was crazy to see a sign for the route to Detroit.  We are soooo far from home.