DE to MI / September 2025

Driving from New Castle, DE to Grand Rapids, MI | Honey Run Falls, OH | Harding Memorial | Weekend in Michigan | September 2025

Curtis’ work in NJ wrapped up on a Thursday night, so the next morning we packed up and started on the next leg of his fall season. His next assignment was in Illinois the following week, so we decided to use the extra days in between as an opportunity to visit his parents in Michigan. Our drive started with taking I-76 across PA (which we would never do without the company paying us to because the tolls are too expensive here!) and then taking I-70 into WV. We exited the interstate to grab a new WV county, then continued into Ohio. Wanting to get a few more OH counties, we left the interstate and took the scenic route on state highways.

As the early evening approached, we started to look for places to camp. There was a trailhead online listed as being safe to stay overnight, but when we arrived we found very obvious ‘no camping’ signs and decided not to risk it. Instead, we went for a short hike to see Honey Run Falls, which was a little more than a trickle but still worth seeing. We climbed around on the rocks and enjoyed it from different angles before making our way back to the van. I made dinner in the parking lot, and we decided to drive another hour further to a rest area where overnight parking was allowed. The rest area was off of US-23, which was a quieter highway, so there wasn’t much traffic noise overnight, and we had a pleasant night here. However, we were a little melancholy over the fact that this would be our last night in the van for at least 5 weeks.

The next morning, we got an early start on our drive. The one stop we made today was in Marion, OH at President Harding’s memorial. Another president’s gravesite added to our list — we don’t actually keep track of where they all are, we just stop and see them when we realize we’re nearby and it’s convenient. But this does make our third seen in Ohio this year. We also drove past his home on our way through town.

We entered two new counties, then continued on into Indiana and then Michigan. And on the home stretch of our drive….we got a cracked windshield. Our third for this van — I guess that’s the price we pay for having a huge windshield? It was a disappointing way to end the trip, but at least we made it to Curtis’ parent’s home safely.

Since the rest of our fall schedule would be back-to-back outages and no chance for van adventures, we decided to give our van a break for the month and get a rental car. We picked up a car, thoroughly went through everything in the van to figure out what we’d need for the month, and then cleaned and turned off the electrical system. We would miss it, but we knew it was better to leave it here than to drive it back and forth between the Midwest and East Coast again.

Besides our van chores, we had a great weekend with Curtis’ parents, catching up, going for short walks to embrace the early fall weather, and enjoying Curtis’ last few days off before his nonstop workdays began.

Visiting Presidential Homes and Gravesites with Charlotte, April of 2025.