The Trip

A moose! A moose! I was this close to a moose! But I didn't see him. I was taking my turn sitting in the back seat. It was about 11:30 p.m., somewhere in between Marquette and Baraga. Tom was driving. Jojo was listening to her IPod. The dogs were sleeping. Suddenly Tom was swerving and shouting. Jojo was screaming, not because she saw anything, but because Tom was swerving and shouting. She has an active imagination. Her first thought was there was a Yeti in the road. Her second thought was someone was being killed on the road by an ax murder. (I don't know who she gets her imagination from.) Moose didn't enter her mind, or her line of vision. Tom's first thought was, there is a huge road sign standing in the middle of the road. But then it moved and the swerving and shouting began. It was a a huge bull moose, towering over our Rav4, with a full rack, four or five feet across. I can't believe I didn't see a moose! Tom stopped speeding the rest of the way.

The rest of the trip:

It is 651 miles from our house in Indiana to Mohawk, MI, unless you let teenagers drive and they miss the sign for 131 and take a bypass to Muskegon. Then it is something like 690-something.

It is not a good idea to try to make the trip on one tank of gas, and the person driving, even if they are a teenager, should have the responsibility of making sure the gas light doesn't come on in the middle of nowhere.

There are a million ways to play the alphabet game, but I don't care, there is still not a "D" in school bus and cheating is low, very low.

Jojo drove across Big Mac and we didn't die. We didn't even say, "I will never, ever ride with you again when you drive across Big Mac" like we did when Tom drove across speeding the whole way when he was 16.

Okay. That's it. We're here, safe and sound. At first glance the Keweenaw is very dry and the signs say the fire danger is extreme. But otherwise, ahhhhh.