DAY 3 (Saturday, September 20):

Got to sleep in a little.

Woke up and had breakfast. Made plans to take a drive down to Niagara-on-the-Lake with the youngsters. Had to get our hotel bill taken care of first. Looks like Rory & Heather, Garth & April were overcharged and wanted to go over the bill with management. Jerome & I were going to be overcharged as well. Rory & Heather backed us up and after a half hour or more, the bill was re-adjusted. And so were others in our group. Really not the best hotel when it came to Customer Service, friendliness of staff and quality of food.

We still needed to get to the Floral Clock in order to pick up our flags and envelopes, so we had the group follow us. Then back to the Rainbow Bridge in order to cross into the US. Very easy, by the way. Much easier than if we had come through Sarnia. Met up with Jason (Xiek) on the other side and started driving to Cleveland. We needed to be at the Whirly Ball place by 5pm. We left Niagara at 1pm!

While driving, to take the road edge off, we did some MINI ballet. We had 7 MINIs in the caravan for about an hour. Tori and her friend Rachel continued on to NYC for vacation. The rest of us motored on to Cleveland. We got to Whirly Ball right on time. It took a little while before everyone showed up because 4 of the 6 remaining MINIs wanted to check in at the hotel before coming to Whirly Ball.

We had the northeast Ohio MINI Cooper Club (MININEO) join us at Whirlyball and for dinner afterward. And much to our surprise, two of our club members crashed our party in Cleveland; Dee & Lou Kramm (MYTMINI). It was really cool that they came to see us.

We played for 2 hours. Prior to playing, we all had to watch an informational video of the rules and then our first game that we played, we were so delicate with each other. Once Garth and Rory showed up, things got violent! We were crashing into each other and aggressively trying to grab the ball. It was a lot of fun.

At 7pm we were on our way to the Winking Lizard for a buffet style dinner of appetizers and pizza.

The rest of the evening was spent selling raffle tickets and doing auctions. We sold $315 worth of raffle tickets on Saturday evening. And raised a lot more with the auctions. The MININEO group purchased tickets too and won a lot.

One of the items up for raffle was the Hooter’s tank top that we had purchased for the road rally. Jerome modeled it for us. One of the MININEO members won it; Sam Poon. Jerome jumped from the front of the room to where Sam was and sat on his lap and behaved like he was a Hooter’s girl. It was hilarious!!! Sam was embarrassed.



Over the course of the trip and with donations, raffles, auctions, etc., we were able to raise $7555.10 for Make-A-Wish, ($6875.10 to MAW-MI & $680 to MAW-Canada).

After all was done at the restaurant, we all headed back to the hotel and after Jerome and I were done tallying up the money, we went to Rory and Heather’s suite and played Catch Phrase.

Then the threat of Yacht Rock…good night!

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