Day 1: Des Moines→Woodstock, Ontario

We started out our journey with an eleven hour drive. We figured that we were so hyped with the initial excitement of a road trip that we could go from the corn fields of Iowa all the way to Niagara Falls! Along the way we stopped at the World's Largest Trust Stop in our home state of Iowa along I-80, through Chicago in a downpour, through the U of M town of Ann Arbor, and even got to cross the beautiful Ambassador Bridge in Detroit on our way into Canada. The line to enter into Canada took quite a while but that's to be expected. One thing we noticed was that in many areas of America the roads and signage was in pretty bad shape. Some highway exits were covered with weeds and some of the roads desperately needed repair. The moment we entered into Canada we could tell that the roads were well taken care of and they even had plenty of signage and clever signs about safety throughout. They also had their gas stations built in to their highways so you didn't have to get off an entire exit to get gas and hop back on - you just popped over and got gas and popped back on kind of like how you pop off to the toll booth area on the way to Chicago. Anyway, after the long day, we were thrilled to pull into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express in Woodstock, Ontario. I'm sure this place is always busy with folks visiting Niagara Falls.