Ian Rambles
We swang north into Michegan yesterday as we tried to escape the Interstate - some may have called it getting lost but the sat nav knew where it was - so our travels took us along the southern border of the state to New Buffalo on the border with Indiana where we found a traditional independent motel.

Fiona's Journal
We left the motel mid morning after a swim and headed straight for the town of Ypsilante and our first Wal-Mart. Shopping in Wal-Mart was interesting in many ways! A lot of the stuff was amazingly cheap – 3 mens T-shirts for $5, a 7 person tent for $48 – at the current exchange rate of two dollars to the pound these prices seem crazy!

The sheer size of some American people is evident everywhere – amongst the shoppers themselves and the sizes of the clothes on offer. It was a novelty to have no difficulty at all getting swimming trunks in Arthur's size and, in fact, to find them a bit too big when he tried them on later. Mind you, having now experienced portion size in American restaurants and fast food outlets I am not at all surprised. In spite of having eaten Polish merchant seaman's rations three times a day for two weeks I can't even get through a “small” portion of anything here.

The groceries on offer are also very different, although I suspect Wal-Mart is not the best place to shop for food. We had the greatest difficulty recognising anything. It made me realise the importance of branding and packaging and supermarket layout that allows us to whiz round Tesco grabbing familiar items - the green topped milk container (semi-skimmed or 2% milk as it is known here) and the blue topped orange juice carton (without bits, for fussy small boys) and the turquoise oblong box with a line drawing of a baby on it (non-bio washing powder which doesn't aggravate Arthur's eczema) etc etc at speed and without actually reading anything. It took us ages just to select a few items for a picnic and the results were rather uninspiring. The bread is just peculiar – very, very soft and slightly sweet, more like sponge cake! However, George got a basket ball for $3.50 and I got an iPod charger so we came away happy.

I had my first go at driving as we headed West on Michigan State Highway 12 – it took fierce concentration to keep from drifting over to the right side of the lane and to stop my left foot trying to use the very wide brake pedal as a clutch but I managed to avoid any catastrophes

Arthur's Log:
These ******* seatbelts, they lock when you're going over 50, they lock when you're braking, they lock when you ******* sneeze! This is dumb car trying to be smart and it sucks.

The Harry Report
Computer games in WalMart are so much cheaper!

George's Musings
We played in the pool with my new basketball - it was just us.