Detroit

We stayed at the Hotel St. Regis, located in the New Center area in downtown Detroit. Housed in a beautiful, old, and what appeared to be recently refurbished building, it was a rather sleepy hotel, with the staff appearing to outnumber the guests (speaking of which, I was looking at the hotel website to gather a little information about the history of the building and discovered the that both Martin Luther King and Mick Jagger were once guests here…think they’ll add the Clark Family to that list of distinguished guests?). With the recommendation of one of the valets, we ordered up some ‘Pizza Papalis’ for dinner and James hit the streets in search of wine, finding a couple of bottles in a store where everything was kept behind glass and delivered through a little window by the cashier. The pizza and salad were delivered just a short while later, enough to feed all of the guests in the hotel, but rather than share, we opted to save our leftovers for lunch the next day. Initially when we put Detroit on the travel itinerary, we had planned to see the Motown Museum on day 2 but a good friend advised us otherwise and after a restful night’s sleep, off to Dearborn we went. So very glad we did. The Henry Ford Museum is so much more than a car museum and cannot be fully appreciated in 2, 4 or possibly even 6 hours. There’s just so much to see there including cars and locomotives and other pieces of Americana. Some of our favorite exhibits were the Dymaxion house (an idea that never really took off – thank goodness), the presidential motor cars (which included the John F. Kennedy limousine in which he rode through Dallas the day he was assassinated – did you know that both Johnson and Nixon continued to use the limousine even after President Kennedy’s death? That’s just a little creepy. Thrifty, but creepy…), ‘Heroes of the Sky’ (which reviewed the history of aviation) and ‘With Liberty and Justice for All’ (which explored America’s fight for freedom and had on display the beautifully restored Rosa Parks bus which museum-goers could board). We spent several hours touring these exhibits and got involved in some of the hands-on activities including designing and building our own cars with K’Nex and constructing paper airplanes and then testing our newly-made crafts on a course (never could manage the loop-the-loop but apparently it’s possible, even with a paper plane). By the time we pulled ourselves away from the museum at about 3 we still hadn’t done it all but we needed to get on the road. Last stop on this great American tour – Niagara Falls Canada.