Sunday -
We woke up to go to Maumee, OH to go to Rachel's cousin's church. I absolutely love going to church with friends. It is just so awesome to worship with friends. Lunch at Panera. We had a bit of time before we had to meet up with Rachel's boyfriend, so we decided to go to the Toledo Botanical Garden. I go to gardens all the time with my family so I love it and Rachel wanted to go to it since she loves to take pictures! It was a nice garden for being free. There were several different gardens. The teachers in us loved that fact that they had a scavenger hunt for us to search through. Yes, we did fill out the entire thing! A few gardens weren't too exciting as we were past the time for many of the spring flowers but not quite to the lushness of summer growth. We wandered around the gardens for a few hours. We love to take pictures all over. I do people pictures while Rachel and Erin do artsy flower pictures! A good combination of pictures in the end when all of our pictures are combined! Next up was finding a spot for a cookout. This shouldn't have been a hard task, except Ohio has had a ton of rain. Actually a ton is not the right word. Everywhere we drove around Grand Rapids had rain. Property higher than the river were fine. But anything near the river was covered in water. We went from park to park searching for someplace to grill. It was pretty surreal to see grills, slides, and benches under water. Finally we decided on just holding the outing at Nick's house. There were some pretty nasty storms coming in, so we wanted some shelter to be nearby. So we made a trip to Walmart to get some fun kid toys to entertain the little ones that would be coming as well. Maybe the adults would have some fun with the toys as well! Rachel, Erin and I made sure to field test the toys in the store before we bought them. We were those people who play with the toys in the aisle! The party was great at Nick's. There were about 10 of us and no storms! Yummy burgers and brats and everything else for a typical Memorial Day cook out! Thankfully the clouds looked menacing, yet nothing happened! We ended the evening with drinks and a movie. Great ending to a very great day!

Monday -
Oh Monday. How it started out so nicely. We went out to breakfast with Rachel and Nick in Bowling Green. We went to a cute little diner. It may have been one of the only restaurants open on Memorial Day. I had a super yummy veggie omelet! From there we went back to Rachel's to pack again. Erin and I took the train back to Milwaukee. The original plan was to leave at 1, get in to Chicago at 4, leave Chicago at 8, get in to Milwaukee after 9. Wow did that get distorted. The train did not arrive in Jackson, MI until almost 2! No problem, we thought, we had over 4 hours to sit at Chicago. There is no way the train could get that behind! Guess again. As we rode along we heard why the trains were so off. The night before there were a ton of storms. Thankfully we did not get hit with them in OH. But in Michigan they got hit, hard! We heard that there were even a few tornadoes that may have touched down! So a few of the towns we were going through that day didn't have any power. We had to go through the towns at a snail's pace as to not hit anything. Erin and I kept our spirits high as we continued to get further and further behind. At least we were in an air conditioned train car than stuffy Union Station. At least we were in our own space of the train car than stuffed into Union Station with a bazillion other people. Fast forward almost 9 hours later....we were pulling into Union Station. Yes, our 4 hour train ride turned into almost 9 hours! I appreciated the workers on the train. There really wasn't much more that they could have done for us. They told us what was happening. I was able to talk to a worker to make sure that we were one of the first people off the train. Because, yes, we had to run to get to our connection. It was very much like Amazing Race. Our second train ride was much less exciting. We were fine with that. Thus ends that crazy train adventure. I have ridden Amtrak several times without this kind of problem. I am going to mark this as a crazy happening and not something that will cause me to not ride the train anymore.

Loving every moment of travel!