19th – 22nd Aug: Days 133 – 136
This trip so far has mainly been about small towns, open roads, parks and lakes. Since we left Seattle the biggest urban area we had visited was probably Boise, Idaho but Nick had a hankering to visit Detroit. He loves a bit of industrial chic and urban decay, and of course it is a pilgrimage destination for the car nut.
As point of interest the Detroit Metro area has only slightly fewer inhabitants than the whole of NZ. You might not be surprised to hear that there are no RV parks in downtown or metro Detroit, so a visit was potentially going to be a little difficult. Happily, however, we had met Todd and Keta in Copper Harbour last month and they were kind enough to invite us to stay, offering us a very exclusive and upscale RV parking spot on their driveway in Shelby Township, a suburb about 20 miles from the centre of Detroit. The closer we got to the city the faster and more aggressive the driving became. Obviously our earlier observations of courteous American drivers was not applicable to all freeway drivers in cities. We white-knuckled-it, google-mapped-it and arrived in one piece mid afternoon on Saturday. The one thing that we had planned for our visit was for the four of us to go and watch a baseball game the next day, the Detroit Tigers were playing the LA Dodgers. Unbeknown to us however, there was a Detroit annual highlight afoot: The Woodward Dream Cruise. This is a week-long classic car event which culminates in an evening of all-comers street cruising in classic and notable cars and trucks. Folks with cool cars, fast cars, rare cars, old cars, new cars, loud cars, modified cars all come out and cruise the city, based around the long 4 lane Woodward road which divides Detroit into East and West. More than a million people come out to watch, either sitting on the road sides in camping chairs with coolers loaded with food and beer, parked up with their own old classics for others to admire up close, or like us, cruising with Family Thelan in their truck in the most tolerable traffic jam ever, surrounded by automotive eye and ear candy. A real treat and about as Detroit an experience as you can get.
We forgot to take any photos, so here is a stock photo, and a link for the fellow car-aholics.
http://www.detroitnews.com/autos/woodward-dream-cruise
The next day we had another truely Detroit-ian experience. BBQ for brunch at ‘Slows’, another Man Vs Food food joint. Slightly heavier than our usual 11am fayre, but the kilos of meat would see us through the baseball game which started at 1pm.
We had accessorised for our baseball experience with Detroit baseball hats, but on arrival at the ballpark I felt I needed a big orange foam Tiger Claw/Paw. It was a brilliantly sunny day and hotter than Hades. We got a handle on the rules of the game and sat through 5 innings with no score whilst we slowly cooked in the baking heat. We decided to take a break from the sun and decamped to an air-conditioned bar for a drink. This half an hour coincided almost exactly with pretty much all the scores in the game. Typical. But the good news was that the Tigers won and the crowd was happy. We had a great afternoon, but like cricket, baseball can be a little dull.
We headed home via the sights of Detroit. It is a city that has been on it’s knees, but there is a lot of regeneration and it definitely has a buzz about it again.
That evening we were assimilated into a family birthday gathering. Keta’s family all live nearby and have a Sunday evening meal together 3 out of 4 weeks. This week it was at Todd and Keta’s place and we were celebrating Todd and his brother-in law’s birthdays which were the next day. There was a huge amount of food, and I hadn’t really digested my BBQ brunch yet. Luckily we only had a short distance to roll home and I have come to the conclusion that camping in a fully self contained camper on your hosts’ driveway is a perfect way to be a houseguest.
We headed off the next morning, next stop being the Henry Fort Museum in Dearborn about 30 miles away on the other side of the city. It is not just a car museum, but also a homage to American Innovation in general. It needs more than a day to get around all the different areas and due to the continuing lack of RV parks we booked a night in a Comfort Inn just up the road with a free shuttle to the museum. We abandoned TC and Big Dave in a corner of the carpark with our overnight stuff packed into into reusable shopping bags and headed off in the shuttle to the museum. It really is epic. A huge collection of all that is American style, commercial and domestic invention and, of course, the history of the automobile industry. Henry Ford built an empire in Dearborn and you don’t just see this here, you feel it. Monday 21st August was also eclipse day and this area had an 85% eclipse. We were armed with the natty specs, and interrupted our museum tour for half an hour to sit on the lawn and experience the slight twilight, happy to be far away from the madness of the ‘totality zone’.
The next day we did a tour visiting ‘The Rouge’, the original Ford plant that is still well and truely in business. The area that the tour visits assembles the bodywork of the F150 truck. This is the automotive workhorse of the American people and at its height was selling one unit PER SECOND in the USA. It was really interesting to watch the assembly line in action, matching up the right cabs, doors and beds. Poetry in motion and surprisingly quiet and clean.
The 3rd part of the complex that we visited was Greenfield Village. A fake historic village with a collection of relocated historic houses and buildings, a steam railway and a craft area. Not particularly interesting to us after all the previous stuff we had seen, so we left town before the forecast storm hit.