Day 6: Minnesota!

After spending the night in Chippewa Falls, we headed onward! to Minneapolis.  A misguided attempt to see the scenic route got us there a little late, but nonetheless we arrived in time to have (late) lunch and dinner with some good friends 

Very fortunately, it turns out these friends had just gone on a roadtrip to the Badlands and Yellowstone about two years ago, so we also had lots of fun planning the route and getting travel tips.

We also learned that Mexican restaurants in Minnesota serve ranch dressing with your chips:

Day 5: Why God Made Flyover States

It came on the radio as we were driving across cow pastures of Wisconsin and seemed pretty appropriate for our trip.

We started out the day watching bluejays and black squirrels from the window of our surprisingly picturesque Super 8 backyard.  Then we got in the car and drove. And drove.  And drove...over 560 miles.

It turns out that the UP is basically closed for business between October 1 and May 1.  The ferry to Macinaw Island was more or less not operational, so we skipped it, but we did take a look around the town, enjoyed the scenic lakeshore, and bought some fudge.  The bridge itself was an amazing sight and there were a number of spots on the drive with a great view of lakes Superior and Michigan.

I got some smoked whitefish, which is like an ice cream cone made out of smoked fish.  Mmmm.  I got a pastie too, not nearly as delicious though.  Given that it's coal miner food I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

The highlight was probably Kitch-iti-kipi, a little lake spring outside of Manistique, MI.  (Manistique and the surrounding towns are great, by the way, because there is pretty much one road that all businesses are on.  No GPS for us!  We saw a billboard for Gram's Pasties where it directed drivers to head to "the second stoplight in Gladstone".)  Anyway, Kitch-iti-kipi is an absurdly clear, astoundingly green lake that's fed by an underground spring.  You can take a little boat that's on a rope line out to right over the spring and watch the sand from the bottom spew up like some kind of dysfunctional volcano.

From the UP we drove into Wisconsin (where Alex attempted to convince me that if I mooed hard enough I could get a 3G signal) and so naturally we had to go to Green Bay and get some cheese curds.  From there, a long drive to Chippewa Falls and our hotel room.  Tomorrow: Minneapolis!

Below: The front of our car after driving through Michigan (yes, those are bugs, not dirt)

Day 4: OMG. Detroit. Is. Awesome.

On recommendation from our friends Minyang and Liz, we first went to the Henry Ford. With such glowing reviews (and stellar ratings on Trip Advisor) we had high hopes.

It did not disappoint. I loved loved loved the driving America exhibit, which was incredibly well done. One of my favorite museums is the D-Day Museum in NOLA because it does a fabulous job of presenting a narrative structure using artifacts, rather than constructing an exhibit to highlight every artifact that they have. The Driving America exhibit had the same feel. Not just a collection of 'here is a thing, here is a paragraph about it'--they clearly put a lot of effort into curating it into a coherent story, and there were lots of interesting facts (like the fact that people made bigger holes in their gas tank to put leaded gas in since the leaded nozzles were bigger). I also learned that early cyclists and car enthusiasts were on the same side a century ago--both fighting for improved roads. 

But back to the narrative--one of the overarching themes I took away was the effort and experimentation required to come to a satisfactory solution to many of the problems that cars created. For example, how do you deal with parking? The parking meter was not invented in a vacuum--it was a response to real parking problems in cities, and it wasn't the first solution people tried. Similarly, the traffic light evolved--first from policemen providing instruction at each corner, then to a two-color signal, and finally to the familiar three-color signal. It struck me how similar cars were, as a disruptive technology changing the fabric of society and posing new challenges, to computers and the internet today, where we don't have all of the solutions for how to use technology properly, to make life easier, but that doesn't mean it won't. It just means that someone needs to come up with the right ideas and change societal attitudes. A great example of this was on the safety display; in the 1934, there were 34,240 driving-related fatalities. In 2010, there were 32,885, with roughly 15 times as many road miles driven. Car companies originally found that people just didn't care about safety features--they wouldn't pay more for them, or change their buying habits. It wasn't until Unsafe at Any Speed that societal attitudes shifted and the market favored improved safety in cars.

The Henry Ford also also has an exhibit on manufacturing in America; we didn't have time to go through it in detail, but if this picture doesn't make you want to visit the Henry Ford, then you are not an engineer:

Alex also spent some time in an exhibit on early flying heroes, learning about how flying as a spectator sport started due to out-of-work WWI pilots returning home and itching to fly more, and how barnstorming became popular until too many people died doing it and companies wanted to portray flying as a safe, commercial activity.  Henry Ford's involvement in developing commercial flight helped build people's confidence in the technology.

And, of course, we went to the Dymaxion house, Buckminster Fuller's revolutionary and futuristic cheap, portable, assembleable prefab circular home, with all kinds of technologies like gutters that brought the rain indoors to a grey water storage area, and shelving units built into the wall with an access window that rotated the shelf accessible at the push of a button.  The one in the museum is the only one that exists--Buckminster Fuller couldn't raise enough VC money to build actual houses, since he refused to change his design to suit investors.  One of his co-investors took the two prototype houses and mined them for parts to make a single house, which his family then lived in for twenty years.  The family had to make plenty of changes to make the house livable--they ended up using it as basically a playroom addition to their house, and the kids would go sledding down the roof in the winter--so the museum staff ended up doing years of restoration to return the house to its original state.  In many cases the only reference materials they had to go by were advertising posters depicting the house!  (The kitchen, for example, was never fully built in the prototype, and the sink is absurdly small.)

Below: The rotating shelf window and button.  Pushbuttons were very futuristic in the 40s.

Here are a few more photos from the Henry Ford. The car below is an adorable early electric.

The car below won a record at the Bonneville Salt Flats, 409 mph

A chair made out of horns because, hey, why not?

There's also the presidential limo that JFK was assassinated in. Here's a picture:

Our next stop was Henry Ford's playground, Greenfield Village. Greenfield Village is even more amazing than the Henry Ford. We could have spent days there, but our itinerary did not let us. Let's put it this way; it's Colonial Williamsburg but interesting. (Or, if you like Colonial Williamsburg, 10000x more interesting.) You walk around to all these buildings that Henry Ford had moved to his village and can see how they functioned inside, and talk with people who are dressed up in period attire and explain what the significance of their building is. We spent like 45 minutes in the gristmill talking with a gentleman who explained all sorts of fascinating things, mostly unrelated to gristmills, like how undulant fever is contracted from cows eating poisonous weeds and this incredible story about his grandmother burping a cow with a knitting needle through its side after the cow ate green apples. (Apparently cows can't burp themselves due to having multiple stomachs.) Our guide also turns out to have been a CAD programmer some years back and was very excited when I mentioned that I was a software engineer. He told us to check out the Jacquard Loom they had in the weaving shop; we said, excitedly, we already had! (Yes, they have a Jacquard Loom--isn't that cool?)

Below: the original computer programs

In the machine shop, I got to make a candlestick holder using a lathe. Probably the coolest part, other than seeing brass melt like butter, was that the lathe was designed to automatically transition between different drill bits when they were retracted from the brass. It was just like the smart tools in the Rouge, except 100 years older! The machine shop apparently still functions to make specific pieces on order to keep the village running. (Where else will you get parts for your 100 year old carousel?)  We also went to shops like the milliners' shop, with all kinds of fancy hats, and the jewelry shop, where we learned that human hair braided watch chains were somehow a sentimental (hideous, disgusting) fad.

Although we didn't get to spend much time in them, the Greenfield village also has the Wright brothers shop as well as Edison's Menlo Park lab. Like, really, the whole thing. Moved there. Including original equipment that had been scattered around the world. Ford had a *lot* of money.

Below: Edison's lab

Below: the Wright brothers' bike shop

The Greenfield village is incredibly huge--much bigger than the museum, which we also couldn't get through. As a result, at 5pm, we had to leave just after seeing Edison's lab and hearing about how he created three industries in three years (telephone, phonograph, lighting) starting at age 29.

Fortunately, 5pm left us plenty of daylight to visit the sadder parts of Detroit. 

Minyang recommended we stop by the abandoned train station, so we drove out there. It is a short but moving experience to see. You feel a bit like you're in North Korea with its hotel of doom in a state of half-completion and no resources or desire to finish it. It's also a little bit creepy how the train station is this huge structure set off from everything else around it, almost like it's in quarantine. 

Our next stop was Project Heidelberg, an art installation created from abandoned houses and the material inside them. It felt like something out of the lower ninth word in New Orleans which too was largely abandoned and left in ruins. 

Anyway, after spending a day and a half in Detroit, we were left wanting more--Alex and I hope to come back some time and finish exploring the Henry Ford, Greenfield Village, and perhaps learn more about the city itself and its history. 

I was shocked by how much affection I had for Detroit after visiting--I had come expecting to see a city in ruins, a sign of urban decay, with nothing to say for it, good only as the butt of jokes related to cheap housing. I came away realizing that Detroit must have been the Silicon Valley of mechanical engineering, a city with a proud past and incredible contributions to the marketplace of ideas as well as the marketplace of things.  For anyone with an engineering mind or a desire to understand and see the effect of new technology on society, Detroit (perhaps more specifically Dearborn) is an absolutely fabulous place to visit. I was also struck by its similarity to NOLA--both cities with rich cultural histories, near waterfronts and wetlands, suffering from massive population loss and high crime. I came away rooting for a revitalized Detroit and a profound sadness at its fall from glory.

After taking a final drive through downtown Detroit, we headed north to begin our journey through the UP. We stopped for the night in quaint Grayling, MI at what can only be described as a truck stop. Tomorrow, the UP!

Day 3: A Wreck and Detroit

We left Niagara Falls around 9:30, and to save time, I ate three baby bells we discovered in the hotel refrigerator while Alex ate leftovers from her dinner the night before at possibly the only non-tourist-trap on the Canadian side of the falls. (What on earth were they thinking, creating a restaurant that wasn't a tourist trap? I think it's because it was on the border of sketchy-ville, the place where the water-powered tourist economy meets economic reality, so they couldn't rely on tourist bucks to sustain them.)

After our quick breakfast, we took highway 403 out of Niagara Falls; before getting on 403, we passed briefly by Lake Ontario. The main takeaway was that you can't really see Lake Ontario from the road. Ok!  You can however see lots of farmland and wind turbines.

As we were driving down 403, we ran into a terrible, hour-long traffic jam split into two parts, a forty-five minute act one, and a fifteen minute act two, where we learn that our suffering has been caused by a terrible 4-car accident leading to a convertible winding up in a ditch. (Confusing Google News result: Paris Star: Accident Victim Transported to London Hospital.  Took me a minute to figure out why a Parisian newspaper was reporting on this and why they transported the victim all the way to London...but Paris, ON and London, ON are just places that are places in other places.)

Fortunately for us, this was the only major delay we ran into and we made great time for the rest of the trip due to unrealistically low posted speed limits, arriving in Detroit around 2:40. This gave us time to catch the final Rouge Tour that our friend Minyang recommended. It was excellent! Highlights included:

* The intro video that told us that a strong union as a partner of management was one of the Ford company's greatest strengths perplexingly ignored Henry Ford's antisemitism (But seriously, the video was really cool. Did you know Ford worked for Edison and failed twice at creating a company before finally succeeding with the Ford we know today? Also that they experimented with assembly lines by having a person pull a car chassis while people worked on it?)

* The living roof of the Rouge Factory (cool!) and the porous parking lot pavement that allows runoff to be collected and filtered

* A self-guided tour of the plant that assembles the Ford F150.

Below: Leverett dining hall?  Nope!  The Henry Ford Museum.  The architecture was uncannily similar to Harvard.

The Rouge plant itself deserves at least its own paragraph. Industrial manufacturing is an amazing--amazing!--thing. The precision with which the whole process works is incredible. I was impressed to see how smoothly the workers are able to operate, snapping together cars as though they are parts of a lego construction kit--each component is clearly designed to be easily installed. Each worker's torque wrench is computer-controlled to provide the precise amount of torque required, and a computer tracks that each bolt has been put on. It's obvious that a tremendous amount of thought has gone into the design of each workstation (for example, in one we saw a guy sitting in a chair attached to a robotic arm; the arm swung him into each car as it went down the line, so that he could do--whatever it was he was doing.) The factory was incredibly clean--no doubt in part because it's being shown to tourists--but a very impressive operation. It's inspiring to see such a beautiful end result of so much engineering effort.  Unfortunately, Ford doesn't allow photography of the plant floor, so you'll just have to go to Dearborn and see it yourself!

One thing I wondered about during the tour was when testing took place, and how it worked. It turns out that tests are done at the end--after the whole car is already assembled. From what I could tell, each element of the process is so discrete and--in many cases, computer tracked--that pretty much each car comes out OK. (We even saw a guy scanning bar codes on operator's manuals that were being inserted into the glove compartment.) This seems to result in not having to do significant manual inspection until the end, where each car is visually inspected and then put through a series of end-to-end tests--including being driven over pavement and subjected to 2.5 minutes of pouring rain to test seals. They didn't say how many cars in a thousand have failures, or what is done in those cases (I assume they have folks whose sole job is to fix small defects right after the car manufacture is complete.)

After that, we met up with Minyang--she actually works in the Ford building right across the street from The Henry Ford, although we three ended up going to Zingerman's Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, where Minyang lives. Since we didn't eat lunch, we were thankful for the large portions and the chance to see a local establishment. We grilled Minyang on things to do in Detroit--you'll hear more about them in our blog post tomorrow, after we've actually done them.

Our current decision to make is: do we take the upper peninsula or do we make a straight shot to South Dakota through Illinois and Iowa. Current thinking: the UP. But if you've got an opinion and are reading this like, right now, tell us!

An apt salt and pepper shaker set from Zingerman's:

Day 2, part 2: Niagara falls

Drive drive drive to Niagara!  I hear there's something there worth stopping for, or whatever.

I wasn't really expecting to drive into the city and BOOM, falls, but there they are!

There are also a HUGE number of seagulls.  A little seagull cloud sort of circulating a few hundred yards from the falls dropoff, and a cliff face completely dotted with little white specks, each one of which is a bird. I guess it's a seagull nesting area.

We went on the Maid of the Mist, of course, which is more like the Maid of the Drenching Column of Waterfall.  We got so close to the mist we couldn't see anything but white and got driven under the part of the boat that had a nice little ceiling.  At this point it was also starting to hail (!?) so you could also call it the Maid of Hypothermia.

After going way down to the bank and watching the water fall off, we went over to the Canadian side.  The Canadian side is like--lots of people visit here?  Fuck it, we're putting up a Hard Rock Cafe, and a haunted house, and an IMAX, and a restaurant that spins.  It's like all the world's generic touristy stuff combined and a million hotels.  My favorite totally inappropriate attraction was a Margaritaville restaurant that plays music as you walk past it in the 40 degree weather and hail.  Outside of that however Niagara Falls seems to be very economically depressed.  Every house or storefront we passed that wasn't decrepit looking was for rent.

The falls themselves from the Canadian side are really pretty, though.  Even though--or maybe especially because--Canada is also like, you know how this majestic natural beauty could be better?  We will throw some colored lights on it!  Yeah!

Day 2, part 1: Baseball Hall of Fame

Since we ended day 1 in middle of nowhere, NY with nothing for dinner (Alex's entire food consumption on day 1 was a small ice cream cone...the weather and roads were too terrible to drive into town and we didn't even have cell phone reception to dial for a pizza) we were ready for a real breakfast on day 2.  Fortunately, Cooperstown did not disappoint on this front.

The Cooperstown Diner is a super quaint tiny little place that serves breakfast all day.

After breakfast we braved snow and hail (!?) to get to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  The hall of fame is kind of uneven as a museum, but it does have some excellent parts, such as this cow.

My favorite sections were on the history of African-Americans in baseball (apparently some resort towns had Black baseball teams who at night all worked as waiters in the resort) and on women's professional baseball leagues.

Below: Patent application for the Enunciating Base, which for some reason never caught on.

Diagram explaining how to obtain catgut:

Day 1: Hall of Fames and Caves

Today the movers came and moved all our stuff into moving vans. It was quite moving. Then we cleaned the apartment. Our primary goal was that when answering reference checks, the first word that comes to mind is NOT "duct tape" (don't ask).

We got started about halfway through the day, heading through Springfield, MA mostly via the pike (I-90). We stopped at the basketball hall of fame in Springfield, MA on a whim after Alex discovered that there is something to do in Springfield. It was expensive for the hour we gave it ($20/person), but there were several neat interactive exhibits, including one where you can play basketball on a computer with your image projected into the court using a green screen; Alex's big takeaway from the stop was that "we went through the Hall of Fame at just the right pace" for her. (About 45 minutes.) If you're a basketball fan, it's worth it;
otherwise, maybe not.

Below: Some dude was really awesome at basketball and for some reason this caused somebody to give him a phone with a commemorative plaque on it and somehow this is a museum exhibit.

You know what they say about famous basketball players with big feet?  They wear big shoes that get bronzed and put in the basketball hall of fame.

We drove through the Berkshires on scenic US-20 W, which was indeed scenic, with a river running parallel most of the way. (We started off the day trying to drive US-20 W out of Boston but it turns out to be incredibly slow going through all the random little towns in the outskirts of Boston.)

Next stop was Howe's Cavern, a cave discovered about 150 years ago. Part of the fun is discovering that it's been completely commercialized, including brick pathway. But the original tours in the cave were 8-10 hours due to the difficulty of passing through the cave, so it's probably for the best. It is difficult to overstate how awesome the caves are.  First, there is an animatronic Lester Howe explaining how he found the caves, accompanied by a ridiculous Monty Python-style animation of his cow wandering over the to the cave site.  Then when you think things could not get more amazing, you actually go into the caves.  They are super dramatically lit in different colors, and there is a bona fide underground river rushing through all of it (in fact, the river is what carved out the cave system to begin with) and tons of limestone formations that look all wavy and foldy like some kind of sea creature, a ray or something like that.  Everything in the system has great grandiose classical 19th century names, like the Chinese Pagoda or Titan's Temple or the Lake of Venus.  The only thing that could possibly make this place better is the planned animatronic dinosaur park (yes!) which is still in the very early stages.

We then headed over to Cooperstown, NY, where will plan to see the baseball Hall of Fame tomorrow morning. We stopped at the Gateway Inn & Suites at Cooperstown after a very long, slow drive from Howe Cavern...lots of dark country roads and it didn't help that it was snowing.  Cooperstown is in the middle of nowhere!  (Pictured below: north nowhere, on the way to Cooperstown)

The Gateway Inn & Suite is a very nice place--humble but friendly. The owner was surprised to see us pull in, and we were surprised by what we found (not a motel, but almost a house). We even got to take home one of his watercolors. Definitely the place to stay if you're in Cooperstown (which you probably won't be).

Day 0: Leaving Boston

Alex's mom backed us a cake on Sunday as part of our going away get together with my family, Alex's mom and my grandmother. But this was no ordinary cake--it was a collaborative decorating adventure. Here's what it looked like:

On the left, we have California--with an emphasis on San Francisco. Notice the golden gate bridge in red licorice with alcatraz next to it? Below that, the stack of Triscuit wafers with an Intel logo (get it? Intel makes chip wafers?) represents Silicon Valley. Below that, the panda lives in the San Diego zoo.

Across the middle of the cake, we have a long road crossing the continental divide. To the top of the road, we've got yellowstone park with geyers, bears and a few mountains.

Below that, we have the southwest--with snakes and buried silver.

On the other side of the continental divide the road passes the corn fields of Iowa; the money in the corn represents the corn subsidies bestowed on these red states by the blue states on either half of the cake.

Beneath the corn fields is the rust belt, home of broken factories and dreams--or in this cake, broken coins and broken toothpicks.

Finally on the right is Boston, home of the prudential center (the big cucumber) the green monster (the little cucumber slice), Harvard, MIT, and snow.

The cake was pretty tasty, too!  Except for the part where I got some of America's broken dreams in my slice.