Day 20 - One More Art Museum & Our First Trip Across The Border

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Our second day in Dearborn started out strangely. As I was waking up, I noticed that the room was a little warm, and made a mental note to be sure and turn down the A/C tomorrow night. Jody woke up, headed to the bathroom and yelled back that the lights were out in the bathroom. As we both looked around, it was evident that there was no electricity in the entire room, and a peek out the door showed the emergency lights were on in the hall. There was no electricity in the entire hotel! Jody's big concern was with the availability of coffee, of course. So while she headed down to the lobby in search, I headed into the shower in the dark before we ran out of hot water. Jody came back with the good news that while electricity was out with no expected time for the fix, it went out just after the cook finished making the breakfast buffet. So the next step was to head downstairs and get breakfast before it got cold. We were successful on all fronts and headed back up to the room, showered, fed, and with plenty of coffee. The only thing we missed was the orange juice as the OJ machine needs electricity to work. We also couldn't pack the cooler for today's outing as even though the ice machines were full of ice, they needed electricity for the button to work.

By 8:00 the power had not come on, so we gave up, packed up the bike and headed downtown. The original plan was to head to the Ford Museum today, but we also wanted to head over the border into Canada to see our friend Diane that we met on a cruise last year. She and Jody had been emailing since last year, and she lives in Chatham-Kent, just an hour across the border from Detroit. So rather than rush the Ford Museum, which is huge and will take all day, we decided to head downtown to the Detroit Institute of Art which should only take a few hours.

We are staying in Dearborn, which is only 30 minutes from downtown. The trip downtown was very interesting and very enlightening. It really looked like what we had seen on television. Most of the neighborhoods we passed through were full of vacant lots, empty shell and boarded up buildings, and an occasional perfectly maintained home, building or cluster of homes or buildings. It was really kind of sad to see. You could tell from the boarded up buildings that many were architecturally interesting and had lots of character, and if they were restored, they would be beautiful. But Detroit has lost so much of its population, that whole neighborhoods have been abandoned except for a few families who have perfectly maintained their home.

In the midst of all this urban blight, the Detroit Institute of Art is still a beautiful downtown building. There had been talk of selling off its assets to help with Detroit's bankruptcy, but fortunately, the museum is still going strong. We arrived at 9:00 just as it opened, and immediately headed to the exhibits. This museum concentrates on ancient artifacts from the Americas, Greece, Rome and the Middle East, They also have good Native American and African sections. But our favorites are always the contemporary and modern sections, and this museum also included an African American section within these. There was also a lot of classic Medieval, Renaissance, and Italian with a lot of religious art - not really our favorites. There was also an unusual Dutch Golden Age art, mostly unusual due to the violence of the subject matter.

We finished up with a quick snack at the museum cafe and were ready to head out on our Canadian adventure at about noon. I had tried to put Diane's address into the Garmin when I found out that this particular Garmin did not contain Canadian Maps. So I entered it into the MapQuest App on my iPhone and it worked great. But I had concerns with cell phone reception once I crossed the border. So as a backup, I had already printed out MapQuest maps and directions back when we left Orlando. So I started with the phone app, and it directed me to the Detroit & Canada Tunnel. As soon as we got to the tunnel, the border guard told us "motorcycles not allowed" - seems we have heard this a lot on this trip. He sent us down the road to the Ambassador Bridge which we quickly saw off in the distance. At the bridge, there was almost exclusively 18 wheelers, so our poor little motorcycle was surrounded on all sides. The border guard waved us through on the American side. The MapQuest App did not recalculate until we were actually on the bridge. But once we reached the midpoint of the bridge both the Garmin and the cell phone gave up. Luckily the paper MapQuest map we brought with us had anticipated crossing at the Ambassador Bridge rather than the tunnel, so we were on our way. After showing our passports and answering a few questions on the Canadian side, we were sent through. The guard did make us turn off the bike and remove our helmets so that he could verify our faces with our passports.

With Jody as my copilot, we followed the MapQuest map without much trouble. It turned out we only had to make 1 turn about 5 miles from the bridge and then it was a straight shot of about 50 miles to Chatham-Kent. Most of the scenery along the way was flat and straight farmland. There were a few small towns along the way, and the only real indication that we were in Canada and not the American mid-west were the speed limit signs that were in kilometers per hour and the gas station signs that were in liters. About halfway down the road, the farms were getting larger and there were many wind turbines in evidence. Many were operational, and we could see where others were being built. In fact, we had to wait for a traffic tie-up for about 10 minutes while a truck carrying a wind turbine blade was trying to negotiate a sharp right hand turn. Once we arrived in Chatham-Kent it looked like a typical suburban town, and it was just a few turns from the map and we were at Diane's house. It was really nice to see Diane again, she was our dinner companion on a 10 day cruise over Halloween last year. Jody and Diane really hit it off during that cruise and have been emailing ever since.

Diane gave us a tour of her house and we talked about our trip, and Jody and Diane caught up with each other. In no time it was getting time for dinner, and we wanted to make sure we would make it back to Dearborn before it got too late. We headed for a local Chatham-Kent hot-spot Kelsey's Original Roadhouse. We all had fish and chips and it was delicious! Of course Diane loves her ice cream, as do I, and Jody didn't need much convincing. Kelsey's has a specialty called a PB+J Brownie Sundae which is "A cookie jar filled with Chocolate brownies, French vanilla ice cream, Reese peanut butter sauce, strawberry sauce, whipped cream and chocolate shavings", and all this with only 1560 calories! We were each going to have one, but the waitress warned us that it was huge. So we settled with me having one and Jody and Diane splitting another. We all did pretty well, there wasn't much left when we were done.

We bid farewell to Diane (The television show that takes place in Newfoundland I was trying to think of the name is "Republic of Doyle".) and headed back to Dearborn without incident. We had no trouble at all, crossed the border easily, and the American border guard turns out to be from Port Orange, FL and went to Embry Riddle University in Daytona Beach. We made it back to the hotel at 7:30 and were pleased to find that the power had been restored. Tomorrow we head for the Ford Museum, we have all day so we shouldn't need to rush. It's only a couple of miles away and doesn't open until 9:30 so we get to sleep late!

146.9 Miles Today

3294.4 Miles Total

5.509 gallons Today

85.264 Gallons Total

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