My parents, my brother and I were all born in Michigan. We lived there until 1958 when my dad’s job transferred him to California and my family has lived here ever since. My mother passed away in late 2017 and my dad followed in early 2019 and we decided the best place to spread their ashes was back where they were born and still considered home.
We planned a trip to do that in April of 2020, but COVID came along, and we had to cancel everything. COVID lingered on and we finally decided to spread their ashes in a place they loved in California, so the Michigan trip was put aside, but this year my brother and his family and Val and I decided we should go back to Michigan for a family reunion.
All of our aunts (except one) and uncles have passed away and we haven’t really kept in close touch with our cousins on my dad’s side of the family, but the cousins on my mother’s side have mostly stayed in Southern Michigan and we have kept in touch with them. There is also my Aunt Judy who is much closer to my age than my mother (her sister) so we have stayed close. She has appeared in several blog posts through the years and here is a link to them.
We'll spend less than a week in Michigan with the highlight being a cousin’s reunion hosted by my cousin Julie. We have rented a house near where my Aunt Judy lives in Coloma, MI and will use that as our base. Val and I were debating on whether to do another road trip and drive back, but we’ve had enough driving for a while and decided to take the train instead.
We have always wanted to take the Amtrak Empire Builder across the Northern US that goes from Seattle to Chicago so that's how we’ll get there. We’ll take the Coast Starlight up to Seattle, and then catch the Empire Builder to Chicago. After our stay in Michigan, we’ll take the California Zephyr to Davis, California and then the Coast Starlight back to our home. That’s a lot of train travel and we’ll probably be tired of that by the time we return home.
I originally wasn’t going to write a blog for this trip, but this is my journal, and I wanted to have a record of it so I’m going to go ahead and post it, but it will be abbreviated. Rather than a day by day narration, it will be more of a summary, and we are not bringing our cameras so the only pictures will be from our cell phones.
When you read this, we’ll have been home for a while. We are leaving tomorrow, and I haven’t even finished posting our Nevada Road Trip blog yet, so I’ll have to finish that first. Someday I’ll catch up, but until then things are going to be delayed.
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