Drive From Marietta, OH, North On I-77 To Cleveland Then On To Michigan

                                       Friday 5/9/2014

On Friday morning I got a call from the Marietta Post Master telling me my packaged had been sent back to it's original pharmacy. He asked if I wanted it to be sent back to his Post Office or somewhere else. He said he would overnight it, but it would not arrive until Monday. Originally we were only going to stay for 2 nights, but after looking at the weather report the night before, rain was predicted so we thought we might have to stay longer. That morning the weather report had changed to rain chances for 5 days. I told the Post Master to send it to our next destination in Michigan because our plans were up in the air. Around 12PM Joe said he thought we should leave today and see how far we could go before it rained. I agreed with him, because I really didn't want to sit in rain for 5 days. We packed everything up and got on the road by 1PM. While we were packing up, we got some really strong gust of wind, which made me wonder if we had made the right decision. Mallery didn't agree with us, she seemed to like the fairgrounds and didn't want to get in the bus to go. As we left Marietta we drove past some of the old homes in the city.

Marietta had a really nice down town, and we would have liked to have been able to walk around it, but with rain predicted, we could see that was probably not going to happen. The down town of Marietta has maintained their old building really well, giving the downtown lots of charm. The picture above is another older home near downtown that has been turned into a Women's Home.

 I didn't like that we were sitting next to a river at the fairgrounds in Marietta, with all the rain forecast. Plus the fairgrounds didn't have any safe spot to go to if any tornado warnings came while we were there. There was a hospital about 3 blocks away, but was sure they would not let me bring my dog if I wanted to get in a safe place. We had decided when we hit Ohio, we were going to do some long drives to get out of tornado alley. The picture above is of a sign I saw that made me smile on our drive heading north.

When we first left Marietta, we hand several 23 to 26 mph wind gust, but as we got further away, the wind gust stopped. We made one stop at a rest stop for lunch, and got back on the road. Here we were going through Canton, Ohio where the Home Of The Pro Football Hall Of Fame is located.

After going through Akron, Ohio, we left I-77 and turned west onto the I-80 Turnpike.

Just as we got on I-80 it started to rain. We only had to drive in the rain for 2 miles to get to our night's designation.

We stayed at the Great Lakes Service Plaza just south of Cleveland.

We parked in one of the 3 RV lanes for the night. This truck stop is huge! No other RV's joined us for the night. We were once again with the "Big Boys". Because our night stay was free, Joe splurged and took me out to dinner at the Panera Bread Restaurant in the Plaza. Our total day drive was 164 miles. Even though this is a longer drive than we like to do, it was a very low stress day for Joe, because it was on an interstate that was straight and flat, plus the traffic was moderate.

The next morning we continued west on the I-80 turnpike. After about 1/1/2 hours of driving we stopped at the last travel plaza just east of Toledo, Ohio, at around mile marker #75 for lunch.

This Travel Plaza has a RV section that has electric hook ups for $20 a night. It also has a dump station off to the side.

Just south of Toledo, we hopped off the I-80 Turnpike. We paid $16.75 for the turnpike from Cleveland to Toledo.

This construction barrier path going into Toledo, was not fun because it was so narrow for our bus.

As we approached this bridge from a distance it made for a great picture, but I missed getting it because I was taking pictures of the down town. By the time I tried to take the picture, the shot was gone.

So this is the best I got of it.

We finally arrived into "Pure Michigan" where we are going to spend the summer, and look for our future summer home.

After a 194 mile drive we arrived at the Super Wal-Mart in Harland, Michigan.

Hartland, MI is just a few miles north of Ann Arbor, MI on Hwy 23. I really liked this Wal-Mart because it had a sidewalk I could walk Mallery on. Most Wal-Marts are very hard to walk Mallery because of all the cars zooming around.

It was a beautiful sunny day at 72 degrees when we arrived.