DETROIT

Hi everyone,

While I was at the Greenfield Village Neil went off to the Rouge Factory Tour – this is the Ford Factory.  He took a bus from the Village/Museum area to the factory which was about a ten minute ride away.

Enter and go through two theatres which are interactive and have full surround theatres showing the art of manufacturing plus a short history of the Ford factory.  Then it was off to an observation deck where he overlooked the entire factory.  There was no production this week as this is a holiday week with July 4^th celebration tomorrow, but he was allowed to walk around the entire assembly area for the Ford F100 pickup truck.   Security was quite high and no photographs were allowed which is understandable.  There is over 4 miles of production line and at each particular assembly station there was a video display of what happened at that station. This walk through took over two hours and then it was outside to the show room where there was an assortment of cars dating back to round the 1930s – some were restored and some were taken directly from the production line and had very low mileage.

His added excitement on driving back to the hotel was that Madam B… our GPS decided to not obey his instructions and Neil found himself directed by said Madame to drive 194 miles to north – oops.

Luckily he is good with directions and he got off the freeway and found his way back to our hotel!

THe overview of the green roof which covers over 10 acres

Roof planting 

Model A

1932 V8

49 Coupe

Thunderrbird

Mustang

Ford F100 Chassi

Tuesday 2^nd July

Firstly we were picked up by Kelli and her mum Katie and they drove us to downtown Detroit where we visited the Historical Museum.  It’s free to get in and a really great place with displays of the slave railroads to freedom,  famous faces of Detroit, men and women who built this city, a replica of various business frontages which you view as if you’re walking down a street  of bygone days.  An interactive display of General Motors production line,  a video of the history of the area from 1701 to 1901 and we even got to sit in a Model T. 

Kelli and I in the model T at the museum

Tigers at the stadium

Ford Field Stadium

Looking over to Canada

Next was a drive around the city.  It’s very compact with stadiums for football and baseball – Ford Field, where they play football is massive, holding 65,000 people.  We even saw a 42degree below vodka stand all the way from NZ).   The Tiger stadium where baseball is played has these amazing and huge tigers on the outside, even the door handles on the main doors are made of baseball bats

Many of the buildings are made of red brick, and the churches are quite gothic and quite beautiful.  Some industrial areas of the city are in a sad state of disrepair, beautiful old houses deteriorating.  Very sad.  However we drove along the waterfront to Belle Isle – a lovely park area – it’s so close to Canada  that Neil received a text on his phone to say the server was now Canadian and then five minutes later as we drove off the Isle, it changed back again – weird, because we were still in the USA the entire time.  A visit to a Sears dept store, and a beautiful home cooked dinner at Kelli’s and a lovely chat completed our evening.