On Tuesday, July 14, 2026, we set out on a new adventure. We are driving to Boston, where we will board the Holland America cruise ship Zuiderdam for a 35-day cruise.
Our ship departs on Saturday, July 18, so we had four days to reach our destination. After much discussion about flying versus renting cars versus driving our own car, we decided to drive our own car. Of course, we would normally use a hotel with a park-and-cruise package, with a shuttle delivering you to the cruise port with your car safely parked in the hotel lot while you’re gone. However, there were no hotels that would keep a car for 35 days. Luckily, we found covered parking that we could rent on a month-to-month basis via the Neighbor app.
Tomorrow we have an appointment to drop our car at the lot. From there we will Uber to our hotel, and Saturday morning we will Uber from the hotel to the cruise port and board the Zuiderdam.
Our drive has been relatively drama-free so far. We left Eau Claire around 9a .m. on Tuesday and drove up through the UP rather than driving south and going through Chicago, which would be especially awful in the extreme heat. Even that far north, we actually hit 100 degrees while driving through the UP, which felt very strange indeed. It’s a beautiful drive, though. I could live in the UP.
We made it across the Mackinac Bridge, and spent Tuesday night in a little mom-and-pop motel in Mackinaw City called the Vindel Motel. It was small and old, but cute, clean, and quaint. The air conditioner was at full-tilt that evening, since it was in the 90s. The poor A/C was not accustomed to that kind of work, but it did its best.
The motel was a short walk from the Darrow Family Restaurant, which was very good…especially the Butterscotch Oatmeal pie! I had a really nice cranberry/raspberry salad and Dave really enjoyed the local whitefish, and finished it off with rhubarb pie.
We awoke Wednesday morning to a car covered in a layer of light ashes and a sky full of smoke from the MN and Canadian wild fires. We’d been reading and listening to pod casts about the fires in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. But, we hadn’t expected it to drift east so quickly.
Wednesday’s drive was pretty easy. Michigan is lovely almost all the way down with beautiful trees and wildflowers. By the time we hit Ohio, we were out of most of the smoke. Even northern Ohio is tree covered and pretty in most places. We made it into Pennsylvania before stopping for the night at a Baymont Hotel in Erie. It was a nice place at a decent price, with breakfast included–although, it was kind of a pitiful breakfast. We ate raisin bran and had coffee. Again, we woke up to a sky full of smoke. The darn stuff caught up with us.
Today, we drove through Pennsylvania and New York, arriving at our Chicopee, Massachusetts hotel in late afternoon. We’re at the Tru tonight. It’s upscale and modern, and seems like it will be very comfortable. The smoke did stay with us, although it’s not as heavy here. Hopefully, the fires are being contained. We hate thinking about the danger to the fire fighters, residents, and rangers…and especially the critters.
Tomorrow it’s on to Boston.