Ontario, Canada

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We've had a pretty good week so far. Starting with the Green Day gig in Chicago on Monday. It was in the United Centre which is massive. It holds about 25,000 for concerts. We were about half way down the side seats right near the top. The view was still really good though. The sound was perfect too. They were definitely one of the best bands I have seen live.

During the day we wanted to go to the Fields Natural history museum in the city. Unfortunately we had a nightmare finding places to park. The museum was on the shore of the lake so we expected there to be a lot more space for parking there, but it was all multi-story. We searched for a few different car parks and ended up driving right through the centre of the city, so at least we got to see quite a bit of Chicago even though it was from the van. We gave up on the museum idea and headed away from the centre to get some shopping at a walmart. After this we still had a lot of time to fill before the gig, so we decided to try the cinema. We found a couple but the first one had nowhere to park and the second one wasn'y showing anything we wanted to see! It was actually pretty late by now as we had to take long routes due to loads of low bridges that we couldn't get under. We just headed for the United Centre for the gig and got some food on the way. I would definitely like to visit Chicago again to get a proper look around. Once the gig was over we had to drive for an hour and a half to an rv park we had found. We arrived at about 1am so just found a free spot to park.

The next day we left the park, passing through Indiana and into southern Michigan where we camped a couple of nights. I had read that this area of the country had a lot of Amish living there. There were a lot of signs warning about horse drawn vehicles, and we did actually see some Amish people with a horse and cart going along one of the roads we were on.

We had decided to go to a shooting range at some point and found one in the outskirts of Detroit which was on our route. (http://www.firinglineguns.com/) It was at a gun shop where we literally walked in, filled out a form, then picked from a cabinet of guns which ones we would like to hire for $10 an hour. We were shown how to fill the magazines and talked through the safety rules then were left to shoot on the range until the ammo we bought had ran out. It was a lot of fun and will probably go again during the trip.

We left the range and headed north past Detroit towards the Canadian border. We paid a toll to go over the bridge and then had to sit in a queue for the actual border where we showed our passports. They asked us a few questions and needed to see the lease agreement for the van which I thought would do, but then they told us to pull into the search area by the immigration offices. We had to stand away from the rv while 4 people searched inside and outside. They then decided they would have the sniffer dog check inside too. They used two dogs infact! I realised whilst they were doing this that we had left on the table; two massive paper targets with loads of bullet holes in them..! They didn't even ask us about that though. They were just interested in why we wanted to go into Canada and how long we would be in the country. Eventually they stamped the passports and we were on our way. We had to navigate without the sat nav for the first time as it doesn't have Canadian maps. We were fine though, and made it to the campsite after about an hour.

Today we drove about 3 hours and are now just south of Niagara falls which we will be visiting tomorrow!