We left home on Wednesday, June 4 and camped in Harden Lake Campground at Raccoon State Recreation Area near Rockville, IN to break up the trip. The three hour drive on Wednesday left us about six hours to go on Thursday to arrive in Frankenmuth, MI at the Pine Ridge RV Resort. There were 14 campers from Canada and 56 from the US. We met many new Canadian friends and visited with newbies and all the "regulars" from the Central Great Lakes Region.
Frankenmuth is an old German community founded in the mid 19th century. It's a big tourist town with many events and festivals throughout the year. We visited Bronner's World's Largest Christmas Store and the HUGE outlet mall just outside Frankenmuth in Birch Run. It would take a week to visit all the stores, but we managed to spend an ample amount of money in the three or four we patronized.
We and three other couples went to Zehnder's (the family who founded Frankenmuth) restaurant on Saturday for their famous family style chicken dinner. It was really good!
The weather for the entire trip was perfect. We had a good time.
We started our last morning in Carefree by taking some pictures of some of the beautiful flowers in Susan's back yard. Then we headed for the Heart and Soul Cafe where Susan had secretly reserved the '57 Chevy for our breakfast. It was fun.
Then it was off to the Phoenix airport to catch our flight for Chicago. We had a bit over an hour layover in Chicago then caught our flight to Springfield. Unlike our trip to Phoenix, today's flights were on time. We saw a beautiful sunset from the plane, but the picture isn't very good due to the scratched up window on the plane.
Anyway, it was a great trip. Now we don't have anywhere to go until June 4 when we go camping in Michigan. See you there!
Marsha bought a couple of things at Costco the other day that are too large to take on the plane, so Lou and I taped the boxes together and shipped them out USPS. No doubt we'll be home WAY before they get there!
Other than that, we just hung around the house. I didn't even take any pictures until dinner time.
One more full day left here, then we fly home on Saturday. Hope the weather at home is as nice as it's been here.
With a long drive ahead of us, we stopped at Ruby's in Oceanside for breakfast. Most of the pictures in this post are along the pier walking to and from Ruby's. It was a big breakfast, so we decided not to stop to eat before we got home and picked up a pizza for a relaxing dinner.
According to the GPS, we should have gotten back to Carefree around 5:30pm, but we were delayed by the bus/semi accident on I-10 in Blythe, CA where four people were killed. You may have seen it on the national news. We got off of I-10 and detoured via Parker, AZ which added an hour to our trip.
Anyway, it was a long drive, but we got home safely to enjoy our pizza and beer by the pool.
