Back in the USA (Michigan to Wisconsin)

Who knew that getting back into the country was going to be so hard? As we last left you, we were traveling north to New York to visit Niagara Falls and cross over into Canada to allow Ben to update his visa status. We successfully made it to the falls and spent a few moments enjoying their impressive presence. For those who haven't visited Niagara, there's nothing that graceful, but there really is a lot of water, and the plume of water vapor was visible from miles away.

(While we got pretty close, it was nothing as daring as this family - We were genuinely scared for the little guy!)

Small World Moment #1: While strolling along the paths above Niagara Falls, who do we run into but a high school classmate of Karen's! Somehow, we both chose to stop in Niagara at the same time, and picked the same path to walk down, resulting in a surprise meeting after years of not seeing one another - crazy!

The fun and excitement of that over, we proceeded to un-eventfully enter Canada and drive the 200 odd miles over to the U.S. border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan. With the gas tank almost empty however, and our end goal of making it back to the US so close, we had to first sit on the bridge to the US for 30 minutes in a painfully slow queue (not even to the border and already things were tense). Once at the crossing, we explained our story and flashed our supporting documents only to be directed to pull over (thankfully before we ran out of gas) and to present our story inside the guard building. It may have been the lack of sleep the night before or that we were both recovering from being sick, but what a surreal experience. Guards coming and going, stopping to look very serious while tapping a few keys on the computers, looking at a small sheet of paper on the wall then heading back out. Only three of the multitude of guards were actually helping people, and to cut a long story short, we had to repeat our story many times, were left unattended (without explantion) for half an hour minus our passports and our forwarding plane tickets, and when our guy did finally appear again it was only to request obscure documents (that we didn't have) to prove Ben wasn't in fact a rampaging terrorist (so why again are you flying to Ecuador?) or that Karen was illegally smuggling her husband back into the U.S. But let us in they finally did, and so exhausted but still happy, we limped into town, filled up the car and crashed in a hotel - vowing to never attempt a border crossing on this camping trip again!

Anyway since then things have really looked up! We spent a day at Cedar Point - a massive rollercoaster park on Lake Erie with one of the World's tallest and fastest at 420 feet and reaching 120 mph in under 4 seconds - nice!! (only Ben was crazy enough to ride) We were kindly accomodated and shown around beautiful Chicago by Matt and Katie (we highly reccommend a boat tour to check out the city (and Sears Tower) from the Chicago river). Interestingly enough, we learned that those early-day Chicagoeans (sp?) used the river as their dump for all the toxic wastes they could find except that it flowed into the lake (their water supply) and as much as 20% of the town died from typhoid, etc. Smart chappies that they were, they employed their engineers to 'simply' reverse the river flow (the only other river in the world to be reversed believe it or not is the Snowy river in Australia, which has now been re-reversed), and so now they enjoy clean water while their filth flows south for ~1500 miles along the Mississippi. It's just a pity all the other big cities on the lake didn't have that idea (or the $) as their waste unfortunately (you guessed it) flows into the lake and Chicago's 'pure' drinking water - oh well nothing's perfect!

The last few days we have been living it up and relaxing with our good friends Christian and Barbara in Madison, Wisconsin, and while I don't know how they deal with their waste water it is a great town as well! (Beer, brats, cheese - what more could you ask for?) Today we head west along Interstate 90, and leave the warm showers and comfortable beds behind for good. Not sure when we'll be near a computer again, but you can be sure we'll be hardened camping and hiking experts by then - or maybe just smelly and dirty campers complaining about the lack of air conditioning out in the U.S. national parks?

Take care,
Love Karen and Ben