My wife and I have had our travel trailer for close to ten years now. It's crazy to think it has been that long. It feels like just the other day we were bringing it home for the first time. It's given us many joys and heartaches (due to some expensive repairs), but my hope is that we continue to get many more years of enjoyment from it. After we upgraded our tow vehicle, it has always been in the back of my mind that we need to take a longer trip with it.
As you have probably seen from my posts over the years, we have spent an extensive amount of time traveling around my home state of Michigan. The one thing we haven't done (until now), is take our trailer outside of the state. That all changed this past week when we pointed the truck North and embarked on our first multi-stop camping trip outside of the state.
As a kid, my family used to do stuff like this all the time. I fondly remember our two week long trip out to New England, and the long trek down to Florida when I was just a young pup. There are only a few states East of the Mississippi river that I haven't visited or driven through on one of my childhood camping trips.
I'm not really a hot weather person though, so the idea of going South wasn't really in the cards. Instead, I decided on The Apostle Islands area of Wisconsin. Since we had already been to the far reaches of Michigan's upper peninsula, making the short jaunt over to Wisconsin wasn't that big of a deal. Plus, I remembered seeing something online a long time ago about The Apostle Islands, and they looked absolutely beautiful, so that always kind of stuck with me.
This likely won't be the last time you see this photo, but I just want to give you some perspective. We left on Tuesday morning the 7th of July, and we returned home Tuesday afternoon around 1 PM on July 14th. We were gone a total of 7 days and covered a distance of 1356 miles in our truck. That includes getting to our destination and our various day trips that we took while there. As you can see, our fuel economy was pretty abysmal, but that's to be expected when you are towing about 7000 pounds behind you.
Once I get all the figures together, I also plan on sharing how much we spent on fuel for this trip. Trust me, it isn't going to be pretty though gas was a bit cheaper in Wisconsin than it was in Michigan. 
The good news for you, is that I will sharing all of our adventures with you here on HIVE. You better believe there will be some amazing photos of stunning views, lots of photos of some delicious food, and of course some random photos of beer as well (we did go to Wisconsin after all!).
Our first two days were kind of throw away days as they were dedicated mainly towards travel. We covered an ambitious 380 miles our first day of travel and it's safe to say we were pretty drained by the time we pulled into Van Riper State Park in the far midwestern reaches of Michigan's upper peninsula.
On our way, we stopped at one of our favorite restaurants in the small town of Epoufette, MI. It's called the Cut River Inn, and I have written about it before in some of my HIVE posts. It has become a must stop for us if we are cruising along US 2 in the UP. At least on the way West, we have never stopped there on our way back through.
I always get the lake superior whitefish that you see in the first photo above. If you have never had lake superior whitefish, you are really missing out. It's a meaty but mild fish that fries up really well and is just absolutely amazing. If there is one major regret I have from this past trip, it's that I didn't eat more whitefish. As you can see,
Sorry, I had to share another photo of the fish, it was just that good. We actually got lucky we visited Cut River Inn when we did. Shortly after we were seated and we ordered our food, we saw the waitresses scrambling around talking about how they needed to close the place down. It turns out they had been so busy that morning before we got there around 1 PM that they went through the majority of their prepared food, so they had to close the doors to new customers until 3 PM to prepare more. I'm just glad we were able to get in and out with full bellies when we did.
We rolled into Van Riper State Park a couple hours later. Since we were just spending one night there and leaving for the final leg of our trip to Wisconsin the next day, we didn't really set up camp or anything. In fact, our trailer was pretty unlevel on the site, and we found ourselves laughing all night about how we felt like we were listing to one side.
Just a week prior, this campground had experienced a massive storm that toppled trees and damaged a fair number of vehicles and campers. Luckily for us, the weather was much nicer on our visit, but the damage throughout the campground was still apparent.
We called it a fairly early night anticipating what adventures the rest of our trip would bring.
Stay tuned for the rest of the trip and buckle up, because these are only 8 of the 370 photos we took!
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or
