It was dark on Friday night, when we drove into Ann Arbor. We ate supper at Zingerman's, a favorite gathering spot of Ann Arbor natives. We had a great meal of sweet potato fries, pulled pork with four barbecue sauces, stewed kale, mac'n'cheese, and berry cobbler ala mode.
The next morning, we wandered through the colorful Ann Arbor market. We checked out local specialties like duck eggs, hickory syrup, and bright spring plants. We bought fresh apple cider to drink on the road.
We paused at the University of Michigan, draped in ivy and tradition. We wandered through the law school "quad", with its Gothic library and buildings. Jonny was accepted at the University of Michigan and wondered what it might have been like to spend a few years here.
We drove on to Detroit, where we stopped at the Henry Ford museum complex in Dearborn, with its iconic clock tower. We bought a combo ticket for the assembly line tour, museum, Titanic exhibit, and Greenfield Village. We saved Greenfield Village for Monday, but spent most of Friday seeing the assembly line and the museum.
The assembly line was fascinating. We walked one mile on a catwalk high above the workers, looking down as one Ford truck per minute was assembled and rolled off the line. We couldn't take pictures in the building, so thank you, Google Images! The LaRouge Ford plant was a huge operations which had been the scene of union strife and great prosperity, for nearly 100 years. In the show room at the plant, we checked out the many models of Fords including this 20 millionth Ford car.
The Henry Ford Museum reminded us of the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. We posed in a Model T, designed our own paper airplanes and flew them on a paper airplane range (with markers to measure how many feet they flew. We climbed into the yellow bus in which Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man, and sparked the Civil Rights era. We saw the limousine in which Kennedy was shot. We also wandered through many other exhibits, from displays of American furniture from colonial times to the present, to rooms displaying popular culture from the different generations of living Americans, such as the "Greatest Generation," the "Baby Boomers," and "Gen X".
We also toured a special traveling exhibit on the Titanic. We saw a recreation of the elaborate first class curving staircase, and we saw a comparison to third class quarters. We each received a card describing a particular Titanic passenger. At the end of the tour, we discovered whether our passenger had lived or died.
After the Museum, we visited downtown Dearbourn, with the largest population of Arab Americans in the U.S. There were Arabic signs everywhere, even for pediatricians. We picked up a free paper, the "Muslim Observer." We ate a luscious Leabanese lunch at Hamido, with huge protions of hummus, rice, salad, and grilled meats.
We ate dessert at Shamila, an Arab bakery. There were scrumptious Western cakes and puddings, but also many distinctly Arab dishes. We tasted baklava, coconut pudding with pistachio nuts, and nut cakes. We then swung past the huge Dearborn mosque, celebrating its 50th anniversary.
We were exhausted by the time we had checked into our hotel and driven to downtown Detroit. We walked through the elaborate General Motors Tower to the promenade along the river. On the other side of the river was Canada, and border patrol strolled with us. While Dave and Jonny snoozed on the cement, I wandered among the little kids playing in fountains as their parents lounged about, resting and talking. We then strolled together down the promenade, appreciating such sights as four curvaceous ladies in matching jungle pattern pants.
