even with a few delays, we’ve been making such good time that it was possible to plan for a surprise visit with grandpa and grandma snowdeal in grand blanc, michigan which is about about 230 miles from cleveland, but we decided to be ambitious and try and drive the entire leg of the trip without stopping so we could get there in time for a nice visit.

not long after we started driving we began seeing the unmistakable sign that you’re back in the midwest – miles and miles of cornfields.

on our last day of driving, we passed through detroit, michigan the ancestral homeland of the galaxie 500.

outside of the region, it’s a little known fact that the closer you get to detroit the faster you have to drive just to keep up with traffic, as if everyone is unconsciously overtaken by the spirit of days gone by when the great american muscle car was perhaps a little more popular than it is today ( in fact, the 1965 1965 galaxie 500 could be considered a prototypical muscle car ).

i tried to keep up with traffic, but it can get a little tricky to haul a trailer when your going faster than 80 miles per hour, so i had to settle with barely letting the galaxie strut her stuff while passing through the land of her birth ( i’m sure someboy reading this might even be able to hazzard a guess as to what factory she built in ).

at last, after 4 hours of driving which was about fifteen minutes longer than odin cared for, we arrived in the lovely suburban landscape of grand blanc, michigan; obviously grandpa and grandma were quite happy to see us. but my first priority was getting mauja out for walk, so i missed the photo op 😉

soon after we arrived they surpised odin with a belated birthday gift – a nice, new radio flyer wagon!

while it’s not an old school metal wagon ( which is nice, don’t get us wrong ), but what it lacks in sentimental charm it makes up for by having all sorts of modern features, such as a cooler in the bottom! the box cheerily suggests it can be used for soda, but we might have to find something else to put in the cooler for at least a few more years.

maybe i can teach odin to wheel around adult beverages! oh, cmon. it’s a joke. where’s your sense of humor!

after the adults had lunch, grandma snowdeal gave odin his lunch in a bottle and then he did something that’s quite unusual. something that he’s only done once before that coincidentally also happened when he was hanging out with grandma.

he fell asleep.

odin never falls asleep in anyone’s arms, much preferring the car seat or his bed. or rather, i guess he almost never does, since he seems to enjoy making grandma the exception to the rule.

after a short nap, it was time to say goodbye and finish our trip with a relatively short 119 miles drive from grand blanc to grand rapids. ironically, shortly after we left, after travelling over 2,600 miles ( 4184 kilometers ) in our trip there and back again, kris and i got separated on the highway in a tricky bit of construction and as the signal from the two way radios quickly went out of range of each other, i heard kris exclaiming (!) that she had missed the interchange from one highway to another. sigh. at least we were in relatively familiar territory 🙂

we arrived in grand rapids within minutes of each other, despite not ever having seen each other on the highway, which is kind of a bummer because i was hoping that i’d have one last exciting story to tell. instead, we arrived safe and sound to the sounds of a whole bunch of odin’s aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who were very, very happy to see us ( again, with the missed photo op! ).