Southbound and Down - 31/5/10 - 2/6/10

On the morning of the 31st, we left our lovely campground in Windsor, Ontario, Canada and drove over the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, Michigan, USA. Another border crossing. The US Customs Officer was thorough but polite and he didn’t direct us to the area for extra inspection, just waived us through after a brief search and a few questions. It was somewhat more intense than the crossing into Canada, though.

Much like in New Orleans, we got a bit turned around in Detroit and wound up taking a bit of a grand tour of the city. I guess the recession has hit the auto-industry hard. The auto-industry has historically been about 80% of the economy in Detroit, that’s what it’s famous for. But not anymore.We’ve seen some ghost towns around the southwest before now.But have you ever seen a ghost city?About ¾ of the city’s industrial estates and giant office blocks are simply abandoned. They sit there mouldering with their windows broken and grass and weeds breaking though the concrete.Its not that the auto-industry has shut down. Its just that it’s shrunken so much. This is the first time on this trip that we’ve seen much evidence of the GFC. Apparently the city government is talking about razing ¾ of the city to the ground and leaving it as open space. Parks and fields maybe. Imagine a major modern city deliberately shrinking by 75%. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Southbound out of Detroit on I75, we passed out of Michigan into Ohio.You may recall from earlier episodes that Aunt Edna’s son Gary and his wife Norma live in Ohio and had invited us to stay with them. Also, Edna’s sister Millie and her husband Henry live in Ohio quite nearby and Edna is with them. So it’s a family thing again.

We’ve spent the last couple days here visiting with them all and having a great time. Gary and Norma live in the town of Franklin, between Dayton in the north and Cincinnati in the south. They have been fantastic hosts and we are so grateful to them.

Ohio is a largely agricultural state. It is all flat meadows and farmland from one horizon to the other. There are a few big cities but still a lot of small towns and farming communities around. It’s truly middle America. It’s old-fashioned, friendly and welcoming. But then again, that has been our experience everywhere, so far.

I was very happy to return to one of my favourite restaurants, Frisch’s Big Boy.Amusingly, for those that don’t know, across the USA is a chain of restaurants called the Outback Steakhouse. It is a gimmicky sort of Sizzler-esque (another invented word, I’m on a roll) place that tries to be more Aussie than Crocodile Dundee. Pia and I have been thinking about going to one for a meal and having a laugh. We’re thinking of doing it here in Franklin this week, with Gary, Norma and Edna. If the staff at the restaurant start to lay the fake-Aussie stuff on thick, Pia and I are not yet decided on whether we should remain silent about being Aussies (I can fake a good US accent) or whether to turn the ‘Stray-lyan up to eleven and watch the staff squirm in the face of a real-live pair of Kangaroo-boxing, Crocodile-hunting, Shark-wrestling, Snake-bit, Outback-living, Walkabout Aussies. If we lay it on thick enough, with straight faces, we could set back Australian stereotypes in the USA by 10 years.Hehe. I think we’ll play it by ear.

We have been doing more aviation stuff, too.Not content with the two days at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, we went to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, just outside Dayton. Wright-Pat is where the US Air Force has it’s national museum. It is open to the public for free. They have hundreds of aircraft from the Wright Brothers’ early military models (1908) to the very latest stealth fighters, both manned and unmanned. There are warbirds from WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Experimental planes, Ex-Presidential planes (Air-Force-Ones) and millions of other artefacts. It is an aviation fan’s dream. Once again, I’m surprised at how much Pia liked it. We took many pictures again, and only saw about 2/3 of the place, so we’re going back to see the rest soon.

In the meantime, I’m also getting my Ohio driver’s license. The US law allows me to use my Queensland licence, or my International Licence indefinitely, but my insurance company (for the van) has asked me to get a US licence, and it’s cheap, so I passed my written test a couple days ago and I’m doing a driving test in another few days. Wish me luck…lol.

Soon, we’ll be going to visit my cousin Molly in Connorsville, Indiana, too. It’s very nearby and we’ve been communicating on the web. I haven’t seen her since 1993 and Pia has never met her.
We hope you are all well and enjoying life. We are. More updates coming soon. Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel.

Tiger Moth

Mark in front of Phantom flown by famous ace Robin Olds

PBY Catalina flying boat. Mark wants one of these to convert into a mobile home LOL

P-51D Mustang

B-26 Marauder - one of Mark's favourite war birds

'It wasn't my fault'

P-40 Warhawk of the Flying Tigers

P-4 Hawk - Predecessor of the warhawk and kittyhawk

B-57 Canberra Bomber built under licence in USA

British Mosquito in USAAF Colors

Bockscar - the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki

Inside the bombay of a B-29

The Ambassador Bridge from Ontario to Detroit

Canadian Night Sky