The Great Lakes and Chicago

I can’t say enough nice things about The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The American Museum at the Smithsonian isn’t even as high on America as Henry Ford was! He collected so many interesting artifacts (and had tons of money to buy them) that it was just a joy to see America from the not-so-distant past. It was campy to a fault and also super educational. I believe that we all learned so much about the evolution of cars for example! Here is a picture of a diner from near my hometown in Massachusetts. There are still diners like this in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania but no where else according to the museum.

Here are my favorite highlights; the Holiday Inn sign, the motel room, the pre-fabricated 1940’s house, the evolution of the American kitchen exhibit, the development of the automobile, the Generation X exhibit, the silent movie theater, the War of the Worlds living room, and the Rosa Parks bus.

Now, it should be mentioned that most of these artifacts were collected long after Henry Ford’s death. I have to give credit to his legacy keepers for giving him a better name than he gave himself. Henry Ford would never have acquired the Rosa Parks bus for the museum shown here. He was a relentless racist. Marley and Cole are shown below in Rosa Park’s seat. It gave me goose-bumps to hear the story told in her words on the overhead speakers as I sat in her seat. I almost cried!

The museum restaurant serves only hot dogs. It’s brilliant! There is only one thing to order: an Oscar Mayer wiener. After your wiener, you can lie down in a human size bun and have cloth condiments spread on top of you. Oooo…it’s just magical!!!

The museum also offers a tour of the Rouge Factory where we were allowed to watch the assembly line of Ford F150 trucks. We weren’t allowed to photograph any part of the assembly line, but I have to say, it was so incredibly interesting!!! I felt like I was getting a close up view of “How It’s Made” on TLC. We were allowed to walk along a catwalk that was about 2/3rds of a mile long. We watched one particular truck per line be assembled little by little.

There were two movies about the factory. One was a Henry Ford Tribute-Palooza, complete with violin music and dreamy ghostlike images of Henry during various stages of his life. The other was a wordless film showing the assembly of a truck. It was great! The audience was supposed to be the “truck” and the room shook when we were on the assembly rack, the heat blasted when we were melted, and the ceiling sprayed when we were painted. It was very campy for a factory tour.

Afterward we passed the late afternoon driving to Marshall, Michigan and the Honolulu House. The house was the amazing conception of a consulate who had lived in Hawaii. He had to return to the United States when he became ill and built a Polynesian style house in his hometown of Marshall. The house is stunning and the interior is just ethereal. The ceiling paintings are so elaborate and colorful that I spent the entire time looking up! Below is a picture of the interior stairwell of the house.

We went to a little local restaurant in Marshall. It was a lovely little café and specializes in carrot cake. Now, it’s not our imagination, this really does happen to us in these small local places; people stop and grow quiet when we come in to the restaurant (remember, we refuse to go to chain restaurants if we can help it). This has happened to us over and over again in these small mid-western towns. They don’t just get quiet…they STARE…and continue to intermittently STARE the entire time we’re there. It doesn’t happen in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, or in the Southwest either. It’s weird. Marley said it gives her the creeps.

Now, there is nothing wrong with looking at new people walking into a room. That’s normal. The stares aren’t mean spirited either. It’s like seeing a banana in a room full of apples I’ve decided. We are definitely the darkest people in the towns we visit (and we’re not all that dark!). Also, they are all so HOMOGENIZED. The people we’ve met all seem to come from the same backgrounds and similar heritages. For example, we walked all around Marshall and didn’t see any Asians, any Central or South Americans, anyone remotely descended from any place other than Western Europe (not including Italy of course!). Here is a picture of the kids on Main Street, Marshall, Michigan.

We traveled on to Kalamazoo. This word is making me insane. I keep singing the Andrews Sisters’ song in my head every time I see or say the name; “K-A-L-A-M-A-Z-oh-oh-oh…I got a gal! In Kalamazoo!” It is driving the kids crazy. The news here is the oil spill in the Kalamazoo River if you’ve been watching TV lately. There are yard sales everywhere to help with the clean-up money and also we saw people in the river trying to mop up the oil with booms. It was sad. Locals call the river, The M’zoo. We only had time to see the outskirts of town, and frankly, I wouldn’t cry if I never saw it again.

The next day was exciting. We had a lot of time to roam around so we entered the address of the next hotel and then drove in random directions to Lake Michigan. We went through the economic ghost town of Benton Harbor and then followed the only other car on the road (at 10 am I might add) to a sweet little strip of sand called Silver Beach near the town of St. Joseph, Michigan. For a small fee, you can park your car, enjoy the convenience of a dressing room and shower, have a playground, a tree covered picnic area, lifeguards, a lunch bar on the beach, and all the fresh water and waves of Lake Erie that you can stand. It made me feel like I am roughing it in Margate, New Jersey!!! In this picture the kids are gleefully running into the surf!

I have to say that I am crazy about the Great Lakes now. I love not getting a mouthful of salt water, to feel the warmth and lightness of lake water, to escape the sun under the trees, to eat something that I didn’t have to lug onto the beach, to pop back to the car for my water bottle and not feel like I had to cross the Sahara, and to use a toilet (!) and shower off the sand when I was done for the day.

What is missing from the lake are Laughing Gulls, pipers, dolphins in the distance, shells, crabs, the threat of sharks and the rotten egg smell of the bay. When I looked out into the lake I couldn’t imagine the kinds of animals that live out there because I am completely unfamiliar with large lake life. I assumed ‘something’ must be out there!

We arrived in Porter, Indiana and went to the Indiana Dunes National Seashore. The park is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. It boasts large dunes with hardwood trees holding them in place, large vistas of Lake Michigan, and an Arab-styled bath house. You can even see Chicago at a 45 degree angle west. What’s even better is that the population of the beach miraculously became multicultural! I was much more comfortable than I had been in the past few days. I almost wanted to give a hug to all the Asians, African-Americans, and the Hispanics saying, “Hey there! I’ve missed you! Where’ve y’all been?”

We walked around the “Main Street” of Porter, Indiana (if you could qualify five shops in a row along a street a “Main Street”) in the early evening. We were super hungry from swimming all day and when I looked at my phone’s clock I realized that it was 3:45! We had crossed a time zone and I had no idea! There were no signs on the highway and I hadn’t looked at any clock other than my watch. I would be ready for bed at 8 pm in this town with a time difference AND nothing to do! It’s good to have forced rest time before seeing Chicago in ONE day.

The drive into Chicago was hellish because Lady Gaga (shown in the photo with Marley and Cole, HAHA!) was at the huge Lollapalooza concert in Grant Park. I had heard that she was going to be there on the local news that morning and all I could do was shake my head. She tends to draw enormous crowds to her venues. The city estimated that 80,000 people would be there for the event. Great…

The other big news of the day was about the missing men in Lake Michigan. During the early morning hours of 1 to 2 am, two men and their girlfriends went out into the lake and jumped off the boat for a swim. Of course, that left no one on the boat. The boat began to drift away from them…and drift and drift. It was windy and this lake, being so enormous that it’s affected by the rotation of the earth, has a current. The two men most likely drowned. The women were recovered but aren’t doing very well. This is a lake that demands respect!

Chicago was so cool. I just loved loved loved that city!!! It has all the big city feel of New York without the bad attitude. The buildings are gorgeous and thanks to the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, there are so many new areas. Chicagoans embrace progress and the public library, the park, the lake-side, the industry is all new and shiny but preserved a kind of uniqueness (the library, for example, looks like it could be on the set of Harry Potter). People were courteous and outgoing. It was my best big city experience. I was also thrilled to be near Lake Michigan and to be constantly cooled by the wind.

We went to the Art Institute of Chicago which is a place I have always wanted to see since college. Almost all students of Fine Arts must study many pieces that are the collection of this institute. Many of my college papers were written about pieces that I have never seen in person. That being said, today was like visiting and academic “home”. The Institute is fabulous. The exhibits are so well done and categorized so wonderfully that I was mesmerized. So mesmerized in fact, that I was able to drown out Cole’s protestations about having to be in an art museum and actually enjoy myself in spite of him!!! This is an actual picture that I took of Van Gogh's painting of his bedroom.

He was great however in the Miniature Room. Below are some pictures from the miniature collection. Yes, these are all miniatures!!! They are perfectly done. Each piece of furniture is no bigger than your thumb!

We left Chicago and sat in awful traffic all the way to Wisconsin. The American Recovery Act is hard at work on America’s crumbling by-ways you’ll be happy to know. For us, it was a long and tedious haul. We crossed the Wisconsin line and for some reason that escapes me, Cole was itching to have some cheese. He must’ve heard something about Wisconsin being the Cheese Capitol of America and he just wanted to try some. Lo and behold, five minutes later we came to the Mars Cheese Castle!!! He had the best grilled cheese of his young life. Wisconsin is such a treat in general. This is a fully integrated state (at least near the state line). There are so many Native Americans, African-Americans, and European descended peoples living in integrated neighborhoods and towns.

Now I know this is a sweeping generalization, but Wisconsin’s economy is booming. We traveled along some routes along the coast into many towns and the Main Streets along the route were bustling with people! The shops were progressive (micro-breweries, hip clothes shops, gift stores, social services, music venues, creative restaurants, etc.) I couldn’t get over how interesting the towns were! There seems to be a theme here: Progressive people + Open Minds = Happy Towns. Michigan could learn a thing or two from Wisconsin. Towns like South Milwaukee and Racine were exceptionally busy. I was only upset that we couldn’t grab a bite to eat as we’d blown the experience on the Cheese Castle!

Over the weekend, we’ll be traveling across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota. It’s a big drive but so far, it’s been such a whirlwind of interest in everything we’ve seen. It’s been a week but it seems like a couple of days!