It was a very busy week leading up to our departure day. We were still frantically finishing up everything we had to do during the week. The kids had a going away get together at the park with their friends the day before. When the day finally arrived, while we were busy packing up the van in the morning, we discovered our upstairs toilet had developed a leak! Of course this would happen the morning we were leaving! After a trip to the local hardware store and dealing with the situation, it delayed us by about an hour and a half. With everything taking longer than expected we didn’t depart the house until 1:30PM (vs the initial plan of 10AM). But with only a 3.5 hour drive, although a bit inconvenient and stressful it wasn’t too big of a deal.
From there on things were uneventful until we hit the Sarnia border crossing across the Bluewater bridge. Although the website said a 10 min wait, with it being the middle of a long weekend in Canada the border crossing traffic was actually backed up over an hour and a half! An hour and a half stuck in traffic with 3 kids and no way to use the bathrooms sounds like a parental nightmare, but thankfully we had made a pit stop about 30 min before and our kids took things in stride. We survived the ordeal and after some simple questions and a bit of surprised that we were taking over a month to get to Calgary, we made our way into Michigan.
We had pre-purchased and activated our data SIM cards for the US, however, we didn’t realize we had to change APN settings on our phones. This meant we had no cell coverage but we weren’t exactly sure why it wasn’t working (we initially thought we hadn’t activated them). We didn’t think too much of it as we already had a campground booked and just had to arrive. As we got closer to our campground it started to pour rain. With all the delays, our 3.5 hour drive became more of a 6 hour event and we didn’t arrive until 7:30PM, by which time the campground office was closed! We had an access code to open the gate, however, we didn’t know which site we were supposed to be on. There was a phone number to call on the door, but with no working US SIM card, no data, and no WIFI, we decided since it was raining with a bunch of empty sites we would just pick one. It was a bit stressful after a long day to try to figure out all of this at the end. Adding insult to injury, the specific reason we had paid a premium and picked the campground was for the water obstacle course on the campground lake. This turned out to only operates on the weekend, which was not advertised on their web site what-so-ever. Not only that but there were signs stating “kids will be banned from the campground for life” if they were caught going on them. Needless to say this resulted in some meltdowns but it was pouring rain anyway and getting late that we decided we just needed to get dinner going and our tent set up and call it a day.
We pulled up next to a picnic shelter and got dinner going of cold sandwiches with hot chocolate. While I cleaned up, Katherine went to pick a site that wasn’t submerged under water and got the tent set up in the rain with Mia. With no where else to go in the rain, the boys were getting into all kinds of trouble under the picnic shelter, but having the picnic shelter was definitely appreciated.
By this point with the rain and wet campground our van was dirty inside and out. I am not sure why I had spent so much time cleaning it top to bottom before leaving on our trip only for the clean van to only last a few hours into our trip..
There seemed to be no other tenters on the campground, but a lot of RVs. We hardly saw a soul, and it was a weird sensation to have only interacted with the border guard after almost 5 hours being in Michigan. All in all we managed to get through dinner and the tent all set up. After a bit more shenanigans by the boys in the tent we all fell asleep to the sound of rain falling on the tent. A sunny day and an earlier arrival would have made a world of difference but we were grateful to have started the trip and made it to where we were.
Trip Around The World 
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