Annual States Shopping Trip

So it's that time of year (now your all thinking, ok... what time of year?) the time of year that has not previously existed for me. The annual shopping trip to the States! This of course us girls (Erin, Renee, Christie and I) have been waiting for, for months. Waiting patiently as the date was picked and the places we were to visit were planned.
We started our trip at 5:30 in the morning (though we were supposed to leave earlier, but give us a break, we are girls) heading off towards the boarder. What is really interesting traveling with Mr. Deelstra is how much he knows about the Detroit area. We were continuously in wonder at the different areas, from the decaying abandoned buildings enveloped in graffiti to the down town with the various different business buildings near the river. Our first official stop was the Eastern Market in downtown Detroit. This market was filled with fresh fruits, tons of mums and other such flowers and even some gluten free treats to try.

First look at the meet market.

Very interesting murals along the sides of much of the buildings,
once again a reminder that we were in the states where there is such and
abundance of advertising.

Eggplant, eggplant and more eggplant.

Such a rich color.

Lots of mums in the market for fall.

Baby's breath.

Rainbow Roses. Interesting fact: I couldn't help but ask the childish question of how the
roses are dyed to be such a variety of beautiful colors. I was surprised to hear that the answer
 wasn't simply something along the lines of, we just dye the water different colors at different times.
Roses are different than most flowers in the way that they actually have veins
 (the guy said like a human in order to create an easier understanding). Unlike most flowers where
you would dye the water a certain color, the rose is actually dyed by way of injection of color
 into the vein. They inject three different colors into three different veins in order to create the
 variety or rainbow of color in the bloom.

This was a group of buildings very close to the market. There some people still setting up shop while we were heading over for breakfast. I actually ended up buying a burlap sack for a dollar. I have no idea what I am going to do with it yet, but I figure right when I find a really neat craft that requires burlap, I won't be able to find one. Behind the large white truck is a sports bar style restaurant named Vivios, where we stopped for breakfast. 

Our bouquet of rainbow roses for Grandma Deelstra's birthday.

The decayed part of town that we explored in our car.
 Crumbling architecture is so interesting, graffiti and all.

After our exploration of downtown was complete (guided tour provided by Mr. Deelstra) we continued on to Great lakes crossing, the largest outlet mall in Michigan. We shopped until we basically dropped (by basically dropped i mean we got there at 10 a.m and we stayed till 8 p.m.). We found a great many deals, even some deals we weren't really supposed to have. Areopostle had some really cheap tops and such things, and in an effort to save ourselves some mula, we combined our forces and added our purchases in order that we might use the visitors pass buy $50 get $10 off. Before we made our purchases though, we did the really annoying thing where we asked the cashier (someone who had just started there) to do some price checking for us. Unfortunately this ended up confusing the poor guy and he ended up entering the code to the $10 off and such. It wasn't until later that we realized just how many mistakes he had actually made. /after setting off every alarm coming out of every store due to a tag that was left on one of our shirts, we realized we needed to go back at some point. We were then sitting in Payless, attempting to discover how much money every one owed me for our purchases at Areopostle when we realized he also forgot to charge us for two items. We then decided it was definitely time to head back and sort this out. 

Later that night we made a grocery stop at 10:30 and a Mc Donald's run at 11:00 keeping in mind that we wanted to be home by 12:00. Overall we had an amazing day, and I think we are all excited to once again make our "annual trip" next year.