Friday 24th August ~ Our last morning in Frankenmuth, the days here have flown by and we have all enjoyed staying in this pretty and friendly town. After an early breakfast we did some last minute shopping and set about packing the car up for the trip back to Troy. We decided to do one last geocache in Frankenmuth, which took us to a beautiful little spot along the river and then on the way back we popped back to Birch Run for Karen to do some last minute shopping. We had lunch there and set off.

We stopped off at Indian Springs Metropark at White Lake, just outside Pontiac to do an earthcache, a special type of geocache, which centred around puddingstones. This was really fascinating, and we were sorry we didn't have more time to spend exploring the park.

A puddingstone aka Jasper Metaconglomerate in Wendys' hand.

We eventually arrived back in Troy just after 6pm and it started to rain as we were unloading the car ... that didn't stop Karen getting up to some high jinks though ... the sight of her skateboarding / surfing across the car park on the hotel luggage trolley is something Tanya and Wendy won't forget in a hurry, it was so funny we all fell about laughing.

No sooner had we got inside the thunder and lightening started ... seemed worse than we had experienced in Frankenmuth the past couple of nights and we watched as the car park got covered in water. We put the tv on to see Tornado Warnings for our area! Holy Smoke! Karen & Wendy had never witnessed anything like this before ... the local news was giving reports of tornadoes touching down in the district we had driven from just an hour earlier. Scary stuff, but we were inside and all fine, the biggest job was keeping enough noise in the room that the dogs didn't get afraid.

We spent the evening relaxing eating pizza and reflecting on the wonderful few days we'd had upstate.

A news image of the Fenton Tornado, Michigan, Friday 24th August 2007