GRAND RAPIDS, Ohio – EDITOR’S NOTE: The video above is from May and shows Red Wings superfan Jeff Kotimko’s ultimate fang rat.

When the prospect of Detroit Red Wings Jonatan Berggren was assigned to the farm team, he did not really expect the adventure to involve actual farms.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, is two hours from Detroit and home to just shy of 200,000 residents. It is known for many things, including good beer and good hockey.

Grand Rapids, Ohio, is two hours from Detroit and home to only shy of 1,000 residents. It is also home to the Applebutter Festival. But it’s not home to a hockey rink.

It is a story about two Grand Rapids and a confused Swede.

Jonatan Berggren begins his first season in North America, after playing his entire career in Sweden for Skellefteå AIK until now.

The 21-year-old forward is one of the most promising prospects in the Red Wings system, but it was a long way for him to join Detroit’s minor league team.

After playing preseason games for the Wings, it was time to head to Grand Rapids to open the season with the Griffins. Berggren packed up a rental car with his girlfriend Tilde and took the road.

“She told me to put the name of the arena in the GPS, but I could not find it,” said Berggren, translated from an interview with Swedish sports magazine Sportsbladet. “I enter Grand Rapids, then we can search for the arena when we get there.”

When the GPS read “Grand Rapids, OH”, Berggren thought it must be the place. The opportunity for two Grand Rapids in the USA did not occur to him.

“I had never heard of it before. But wow, ‘there is probably only one Grand Rapids in the United States,'” I thought, “Berggren recalled. “It was also two hours from Detroit, and they had told me it would take about that long.”

The next two hours went smoothly, although he thought the United States had some crazy drivers.

It felt great with only 20 minutes left of the drive, but also a bit odd. Berggren said he had read that Grand Rapids was a fairly large city, but what he saw was more like a city.

So he simply wondered when he would be met by this big city of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Instead, he was met by farmers in the much smaller village of Grand Rapids, Ohio.

Berggren realized the mistake when he entered the arena’s name in the GPS and it said that it was three hours away. He thought it must be wrong. He searched again and realized what had happened.

Correct name, but wrong place.

They turned around and tried again. Luckily for them, there is only one Van Andel Arena.

The first thing his girlfriend said was, “You should have let me drive.”

“My girlfriend was not happy,” Berggren admitted. “We finally got there, but it took five hours instead of two.”

“It felt a bit like the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’. Right then and there it was tough. But when we got there we could laugh about it, he says.” The guys on the team also thought it was fun. It’s a good story to tell. “

The drive on I-96, between Detroit and what Michiganders says is the “real” Grand Rapids, is one that many Red Wings prospects become familiar with.

When the call comes, the players pack their bags and head to Detroit to play in the NHL. They will either stay there or eventually be sent back to Grand Rapids, sometimes repeating the ride several times throughout the season.

Fortunately, Berggren is not expected to find his way around a map. He has to find a way to put the puck in the back of the net.

“If you ask the guys I’ve played with, they probably say it’s typical,” laughed Berggren. “But hey, things happen.”

While Berggren may have ended up in Buckeye State rather than Beer City, the Red Wings have a smaller league team in Ohio. His mix-up that left Motown took him by chance past Toledo – the home of Detroit’s ECHL subsidiary Toledo Walleye – twice.

It’s good that he was not sent there, otherwise he and Tilde may have ended up in Spain.