Helooooo Michigan!

We just woke up after a second night in Adrian, Michigan, yesterday having been a more-than-successful day of shopping for random RV parts. We planned our trip here to visit the physical site of an ebay store run by a fantastically charismatic man who has run any number (really, ANY number) of family businesses. A former motel, with seven barns, acres of bins of holding tanks, and who-knows-what-else tucked into every nook and cranny of a property which is perhaps still an auxiliary fire department as well as Hoyt & Flynn, CPAs, Madison Central Wholesale is an amazing amalgam of the last 50 years. The grounds are as confusing as that last sentence, but we walked out with new water and gray-water tanks, a ladder, folding stairs, and an odd-shaped window for a reasonable price. The 800-mile drive here wouldn't have made much sense just for the savings on these items, but at $120-160 shipping for each window, and 10 windows (plus a lot of other stuff) on our list, it didn't make sense to NOT come pick everything up ourselves.

And then, the day before we left Wisconsin to come here, I found Tri-State Surplus. With windows $20 less than our original destination, as well as a selection of refurbished refrigerators and stoves (shipping: $250-$400 each) that were priced around 1/3 of the retail price, we managed to fill our trailer with appliances and windows for $2500 - more than I had planned on spending, but way more stuff for Velda than I had hoped to find on this trip. We spent the day driving back and forth between Adrian and Hudson, first pricing and then purchasing and packing our finds. Unpacking the truck is going to be like a giant tarp-wrapped Christmas morning.

Jess pondering how to pack

Rather than head back through Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois and their attendant heavy traffic, we're going to take a slightly longer route north through Michigan and back to Wisconsin via the Upper Peninsula. I've been finding the mid-west to be much more beautiful than I expected, and although I constantly miss having mountains on the horizon (or in my face), the rolling hills, small farms, and forests of this part of the world are gorgeous. And now I get to drive through a whole new part of the world, see two new Great Lakes (Huron and Michigan), and see terrain that passes for mountainous in the relative topographic calm between the Rockies and Appalachians!