Week end in the upper Midwest

Here is a short update on my journey in the upper Midwest, the Ruhr of the Midwest as they say over there... So obviously, the landscapes are typical of the Midwest with endless and endless miles of flatlands covered with corn and wheat fields... However in this very case the landscape is scattered with some industrial artefacts, testimony of a glorious past as the industrial core of the United States.

• Cleveland
  

The journey started in Akron/Canton and then headed to Cleveland in Ohio. Cleveland is a city built where the Lake Erie meets the Ohio Canal and was one of the main gateway for the steel industry in the late eighteen hundreds to early nineteen hundreds.

The closeness to Lake Erie enabled the local industry to easily export their goods to other parts of the United States, to Canada and even overseas…

• Sandusky

Leaving this country of high stacks and chimneys, I headed West along the coast of Lake Erie towards Sandusky and Put-In-Bay. Over there, I found more dreamy landscapes highlighting the sharp contrast between industrial cities and some scattered areas not yet reached by the industry. In those areas, a quiet and charming countryside atmosphere reigns.

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Put-In-Bay is situated on the tiny South Bass Island in the middle of Lake Erie halfway between Canada and the US. Accessible only by ferry, it is home to the Perry International Peace monument celebrating Perry’s victory over the British in 1812.

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Nowadays it more or less highlight the everlasting peace along the world’s longest undefended border between Canada and the United States of America.

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Visiting South Bass Island on a bicycle is a must thing to do if you want to fully take advantage of the quiet and sleepy envronment.

• Detroit

Next stop was Detroit in order to get an introduction to the world of car manufacturing. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler… they are all there.

.The city of Detroit as seen from Windsor in Canada

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The city of Detroit has nothing extraordinary to offer besides emptyand gloomy streets. To me, this city is a ghost-town despite being one of the largest metropolitan area of the United States.

The shabby impression the visitor gets is further exhacerbated by the lack of renovation of the city center: old empty skyscrappers with broken windows seem to be awaiting an uncertain fate.

The GM world headquarters in Detroit

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After a quick glance at the Motor City from Windsor on the other side of the border, I came back to Detroit and more precisely to the Ford Museum.

The Ford museum is the only tourist trap in the metropolitan area...

The Ford Museum in Greenfield is the only tourist attraction of this otherwise gloomy city. It features a nice introduction to Fordism and Standardisation in the early XXth century as well as different kinds of attractions in the Edison-era village.

A ride in a 1910 Ford-T is always a pleasant trip back in time...

• Ann Arbor

After this short hop to Detroit, I started heading back to Akron/Canton through Ann Arbor, Toledo and Findlay. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan one of the oldest and most respected university in the United States. It features an interesting department of Aerospace Engineering which specialty is simulations dealing with airframe icing.

Here is a link to a short movie of this trip. But make no mistake : if you're expecting dreamy landscapes you are at a wrong place as this trip is more or less a trip back in history to revisit some of the United States glorious times…

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Atmosphere...

Most books on weather start out by saying that the air is made up of twenty one percent of oxygen, seventy eight percent of nitrogen and one percent of various other gases.

This isn't that kind of things I am interested in.

To me the air is made up of wind, turbulence, clouds, precipitation, some fog and a lot of nice clear days. Ain't that more charming?