Cleveland and The Henry Ford

Devotees of the Drew Carey Show will recognize this edifice:



If you didn't know, it's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. There's lots of cool stuff there, like Jimi Hendrix's guitar, Elvis's purple Cadillac, John Lennon's doodles, and Hank Williams's boots. There are also plenty of multi-media shows about the history of rock music. However, you get museum fatigue after a while and can't properly appreciate the outfit Roger Daltrey wore in the film version of "Tommy."

Next stop: Dearborn, Michigan, home of The Henry Ford. (It seems like the word "museum" should be included there, but it's actually called just The Henry Ford.) It's a complex of attractions including an indoor history museum and a place called Greenfield Village. You can tour Greenfield Village on foot, or take a steam train, a 1920s bus, or a model T Ford!



The village is a bizarre but actually captivating assemblage of historical buildings collected by Henry Ford and physically moved to this location from different parts of the US and even from other countries. For example, we saw Robert Frost's house...



...and Thomas Edison's laboratory.



We also toured Ford's Rouge plant, where they make F-150 trucks. Ford is trying to make it a (relatively) environmentally sound plant. Notice the "living roof" with greenery growing on it.



Back at The Henry Ford, we saw lots and lots of cars, motorcycles and trains...



...as well as the Dymaxion house, a circular house designed by Buckminster Fuller.



The museum is not just about cars, but includes a lot of artifacts from American history, such as the chair Lincoln sat in when he was assassinated and the bus in which Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back. But really, the cars exhibited were pretty great. Most were in pristine condition. The way this one is displayed, one can almost understand how it is assembled:

Oh Beautiful, for Spacious Skies...

America! We're back. Man, is it a beautiful country. We recently returned from approximately one month of travels via car around the U S of A. Coming from Ghana, some of our most prominent impressions are:
1) It's so CLEAN here -- little to no rubbish lying about, no public urination, and the air smells great (no burning trash!)
2) Abundance -- there's tons of STUFF, no shortage of anything, whatever you want is available at all times.
3) Pace -- everything moves really fast here! Order your meal, and it's on the table in 15 minutes (in contrast with an hour in a restaurant in Ghana).

This is the first installment in a series of posts about our trip.

First we headed north to visit some family and friends in NY and NJ, then westward through upstate NY. We had never been to the Catskills before and were impressed with its tree-covered hillsides and pretty lakes. We stopped in at the Corning Museum of Glass, where they have all manner of glass bottles...



...and sculpture.



The exhibits include historical objects, artworks, technological uses of glass, and even glass-blowing and -breaking demonstrations.

Next stop: The Chautauqua Institution. This place is a fascinating community that holds 9 weeks of learning sessions every summer. Each week has a theme, and experts on that theme (all people whose names you'd recognize or whose books you've read) hold lectures and workshops. We visited during the off-season, so we weren't able to attend any sessions. Still, we were able to get a room, so that's a plus.



The setting is lovely, as the town borders a pretty lake.



From there we moved further westward to Lake Erie, PA. Presque Isle State Park is right next to the city of Erie. It's a pleasant spot with forests, bike paths, places to fish and swim, and a couple of lighthouses.




It was remarkable how clean the lake is. Remember those stories about the water being on fire in the 70s? Now it looks pretty clear, and we didn't see a single piece of garbage. There are even some houses right on the water.



Stay tuned for the next installment about our cross-country jaunt.