Great Lakes
- CARAVAN HALEN
- Sep 9, 2019
- 12 min read
Hello! Great to see you. How are you? You’re great? That’s great. Let me tell you about the great time we had in the Great Lakes.
From Pittsburgh we headed to Ohio, for a couple of days in Cleveland. The main attraction was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie. It’s a great visit for anyone with a passing interest in music history, and especially if you like the 60s/70s ‘white guys with guitars’ Rolling Stone canon. To be fair it’s a little bit broader than that, but we, and most of the other visitors, were mainly there to worship at that particular altar. It’s not a huge museum, but there’s lots of great memorabilia to look at, and there’s no way you can see it all if you’re also trying to wrangle two excitable kids. Unsuprisingly, Mo was less interested than I was at seeing Paul Westerberg’s handwritten lyric sheet or looking at Kim Deal’s bass amp, but loved the chance to bash on a drumkit, design a band logo, and play KISS pinball. Kids and adults alike were enthralled by Johnny Cash’s tourbus.
We also had a brief pop-in to one of the smaller and least well known national parks, Cuyahoga Valley, which has loads of great bike or walking tracks along the Erie Canal, as well as the very picturesque Brandywine Falls. The National Parks are few and far between on this side of the country, but Mo enjoyed getting another stamp in her NPS passport.
Cleveland also gave us our first skunk encounter: I’d left a rubbish bag under the caravan in the evening to take out the following day, and on my way back from the shower block saw something moving under the van. I thought it was a feral cat, but once I got closer I saw the telltale bushy black and white tail. He was a persistent little bugger, and I had to get the broom to get him out of the rubbish bag, which I locked in the truck overnight: the next morning the truck was covered in skunk footprints from where he’d tried to finish what he’d started.
From Cleveland we headed up into Michigan for a couple of nights in Detroit. The Motor City’s reputation precedes it: historically famed for auto factories and great music, it is now best known for its abandoned buildings and empty lots, and has garnered a slightly lawless and dangerous reputation. It certainly has suffered from a big loss of population, as have many other of the big industrial cities in the Midwest to a lesser extent, including Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The shrinking population and rates base, coupled with a mix of incompetent civic management and outright fraud, has led to big cutbacks in services like public transport, schools, and other infrastructure, and the crime rate is high.
We were there on a weekend, but it was eerily empty, and the city does look like it’s close to falling to bits. There are whole streets of abandoned houses and overgrown sections, and huge factories, train stations and public buildings boarded up and crumbling, and it’s cheaper to leave them that way than demolish them. That said, it’s far from the post-apocalyptic hellhole the more hyperbolic write-ups paint it as: those who still call Detroit home are proud of their city, and there are pockets of regeneration and growth, with young people and hipstery businesses coming in, attracted by the cheap rent. It reminds me a bit of Christchurch: there’s a palpable sense of energy and potential, and then you walk round the corner and there’s a row of crumbling and boarded-up buildings reminding you of the challenge ahead. It’s a fascinating place.
We visited the Motown Musuem, located in the house where Berry Gordy started the Tamla and Motown record labels in 1959. The tours are narrated by excellent guides who take every opportunity to break into song, and our guide’s rendition of “Baby Love” did a much better of calming a fussing Kitty down than our stressed shushing. As well as a ton of old photos and memorabilia, you can see the Motown offices, Berry’s apartment, and best of all, Studio A, where all of those great songs were recorded in a production line process inspired by Gordy’s stint working at the Ford plant.
Detroit’s culinary claim to fame is the Coney dog: a hot dog with chilli and onions. The most authentic vendor is Lafayette Coney Dog, who get your dogs on the table within minutes of ordering, and who didn’t seem to mind that the kids managed to spill all the drinks on our table all over everything, twice.
Jack White’s Third Man Records is based in Nashville, and we visited HQ a few years ago, but more recently they’ve opened a bigger retail shop, and a vinyl pressing plant in his home town of Detroit, in one of the city’s most up and coming blocks, surrounded by breweries, cafes and boutiques. The plant is viewed through a big glass window in the shop, and is beautifully designed, all in Third Man’s signature black and yellow.
As we went round the city, we’d noticed steam coming up from the ground at various places, and assumed there was a subway. A bit of googling that night revealed we were wrong, but the truth was far more interesting. Detroit has a municipal steam system in the central city, which when first developed was an innovative and efficient way to deliver hot water and heating: there’s a giant incinerator that runs on garbage and generates steam, which is piped to a few square miles of buildings. It’s a good idea, and worked well until the population declined and the money ran out: the steam ‘leaks’ are due to the pipes being old and in need of maintenance, and there have been various cases of pedestrians getting scalded. The fuel for the incinerator is a problem too: while it eliminates the need for landfill for Detroit and a few neighbouring areas, it releases toxic chemicals, and contributes to kids in Detroit having higher rates of asthma. The whole system is currently under review.
From Detroit we headed for the Lake Michigan coast. First stop was Muskegon, where we got some caravan maintenance done and puttered around the lakeshore. The coastline here is known as Michigan’s Gold Coast, and there are some lovely white sand beaches. There’s plenty of waves too on windy days, which appear to be any day ending in a Y.
A few hours further north is Mackinaw City, the gateway to Mackinac Island (note the confusing different spelling). The island sits in the straits of Mackinac, where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, and is a short but bumpy ferry ride away from the mainland. It's very cute, and very touristy, with more fudge shops than is strictly necessary. There are no motor vehicles allowed, so all transport is horse and cart or bike. We opted for the latter, and rented a couple of bikes and a trailer for the kids to sit in. The island is small enough to comfortably ride around: the trail around the shoreline is 8 miles long, and relatively flat, although even a small hill is a bit painful when you’re pulling two wriggly girls in a trailer and haven’t been on a bike for a while.
The Mackinac Bridge connects the lower part of Michigan with the Upper Peninsula. It’s one of the longest suspension bridges in the world, and you get great views of Lake Michigan to the west and Huron to the east. The Upper Peninsula, or UP as the locals call it, is much less populated and developed, and the pace is a bit slower. Yoopers really, really like pasties (a cultural gift from Cornish miners many years ago) and Bigfoot paraphernalia, both of which I’m very much in favour of. We spent a great couple of days at Munising at a state park right on the shore of Lake Superior, just down the road from the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
The Pictured Rocks themselves are the cliffs along a 50-odd-mile stretch of the lake, and an unusual mineral makeup gives them some curious colouring. They are best seen from the water, but a half-day boat trip was going to be beyond two little-‘uns, so we opted for some short hikes on land. The UP has tons of lovely waterfalls: we did the short walk to Munising Falls, which was nice enough, but the highlight was seeing a mink (like a smaller otter) slink down a hillside and swim off down the river. We also visited a very pictureseque, and very very windy, sandy beach, went on a boardwalk through a swamp, and got a good view of the Miners’ Castle, one of the best known parts of the Pictured Rocks, from up on a cliffside.
We headed south through Wisconsin: unfortunately this was another state where we didn’t really have enough time to do much, other than buy some of their famous cheese. If we had longer on the trip (?!), I’d have liked to take in a football game at Green Bay, and stop in at Milwaukee, which sounds like a cool town: they take their beer and bowling seriously, which is a good start, and the half-time entertainment at the baseball consists of people dressed as sausages having a race.
While we didn’t have enough time in Wisconsin, we got a few nights in Chicago, which was one of the parts of the trip I was most looking forward to. Fifteen years ago (good grief) I lived in Chicago for a short while, and while I didn’t enjoy my job, I loved the city and have always wanted to go back. Like most big cities, there are no RV parks within an hour’s drive, so we decided to leave our caravan in the RV park and stay in a hotel in the city, which was a treat in itself (Mo: “Can’t we just stay here for longer? Do we have to go back to the caravan – it’s so small”).
Our hotel was a few blocks away from Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, and we’d got tickets for their afternoon clash with the Seattle Mariners on Labor Day. We weren’t sure how the girls would fare with an afternoon of baseball, but the whole outing went really well. It was a lovely sunny day, which always helps, and the walk to the ground amongst loads of other Cubs fans was a good way to start. Wrigley is one of the older ballparks, and while not as charming as Fenway Park in Boston, it’s much less bland than most modern stadia, but still has good facilities. The girls weren’t that into the game at first, but hot dogs and chips, and then a walk around the stadium kept them amused, and the seventh inning stretch and a five-run seventh inning, with lots of cheering and chanting, converted Mo to baseball fandom. The Cubs won, the “W” flag was flown, the victory song was sung, and we left happy.
My old apartment was in Lakeview, just a few blocks south of Wrigley, and it was fun having a walk around my old neighbourhood: I’m not sure the girls found the nostalgic travelogue all that thrilling, but I sure liked it.
Our Cubs day was hot and sunny, but the next day was a reminder to not be too rose-tinted about Chicago’s weather: it’s not called the Windy City for nothing, and the windy autumn leads into a long and brutal winter.
We spent a fun morning downtown putzing around in Millennium Park, where the girls loved Crown Fountain (two giant granite blocks with digital faces that smile, blink, and spit water) and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, better known as “The Bean”, a huge mirrored jellybean that reflects the park, the city skyline, and a plaza full of selfie-taking tourists. It’s become an iconic image of Chicago, and it’s an awful lot of fun.
Downtown Chicago is one of the most attractive inner cities I’ve been to. It’s the skyscrapers: they’re big but not overly ostentatious, and retain a little bit of quiet Midwestern humility. Chicago’s mix of architectural styles and materials seems to gel better than in most other places, and the more unusual buildings such as the Marina City development (or as Wilco fans would know it, the towers on the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) don’t jar. The location helps too, built next to a pretty lake, with a river winding through it, and the “El”, the historic elevated train line adding character. The effect is one of calm and order rather than chaos and stress like, say, New York. I do rather like Chicago, can you tell?
We capped off our downtown experience with a deep dish pizza at Giordano's. Americans like to a call a whole pizza a pie, which makes no sense to me when it’s a thin NY-style pizza. But a Chicago style pizza can definitely pass for a pie – it’s about three times the height of a normal pizza, laden with oozy cheese and marinara, with a big old crust holding it all together. The deep dish pizza is delicious, and has probably funded the holiday home of many an Illinois cardiologist.
Iowa got the Wisconsin treatment: a drive through and an overnight on our way to Minnesota. The state is as flat as a pancake, with endless fields of corn and cute red barns as far as the eye can see. The plane carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper went down in one of those fields in 1959, and there’s a small memorial at the crash site near the town of Clear Lake.
We stayed just south of Minneapolis, MN, close to two of its main attractions: Paisley Park, and the Mall of America. The Mall is America’s biggest, which in a country that just bloody loves buying stuff is quite the accomplishment. It's not as ludicrously enormous as I was expecting, it does have a theme park with not one but two rollercoasters in the middle of it, so it is clearly a little larger than the Pakuranga Plaza.
After the huge success of Purple Rain, Prince spent some of the money having Paisley Park built on the outskirts of his hometown, as a creative hub for his music and film projects, and following his death in 2016, it opened as a museum offering tours (but no photography allowed hence the boring exterior shot). It’s a huge complex with multiple recording studios, a massive soundstage, a nightclub, and at one stage a full-size indoor basketball court. Since 2016, various rooms have now been converted to galleries, with instruments, costumes, and other artefacts including a Minnesota drivers licence in the name of Prince Rogers Nelson which for some reason I thought was particularly great to see . I always find it interesting to peek into the creative processes of artists, so that side of the tour was fun, but I was expecting a little more weirdness if I’m honest: when you’re a super-wealthy genius, no-one’s going to question your taste or iron out your quirks, and Prince certainly had a few of those. Paisley Park was primarily a place of business though, so maybe he saved the wall-to-wall purple drapes for home. The closest you get to OTT interior design is in the atrium area, which is painted with blue sky and fluffy clouds, and features a pair of caged doves and a large mural of Prince’s eyes set on either side of a giant TAFKAP symbol.
We had an afternoon in Minneapolis itself, and went for the classic city triumvirate of beer, novelty public artworks, and donuts. The beer part was at Surly Brewing, whose suds were excellent (see later) and whose food was also outstanding. The art was in the city’s sculpture garden, including the very cool Spoonbridge & Cherry (which sounds like the detective agency in a blaxploitation film), and Hahn/Cock, a giant royal blue rooster. The donuts were at Glam Doll, which provided enough of an afternoon tea sugar rush to send the girls medium bananas. There was also a bit of fun music nerdery as we drove around, playing spot the Hold Steady lyric reference.
Kitty’s favourite word is definitely still “No!”. It works as a handily rigged Magic 8 Ball: “Kitty, shall we do the dishes tonight?”; “Kitty, shall I save this last beer for tomorrow?”.
The last couple of weeks has been a good weather-window for sitting outside the van of an evening around a fire. Our fire-building and s’mores-making skills are now finely tuned, but as we head further north and into autumn we’re going to need to rug up!
We’ve got about a month left of the trip: three weeks on the road and then a week in Alaska to finish. We’ve got a lot of driving left to come: there’s a whole lot of open space in North Dakota and Montana to get through, so we’ll be spending even more time in the truck than normal. Tune in next time for a bunch more National Parks, a faux-Bavarian village, and most likely some more beer.
BEERWATCH: They like their beer in this part of the world so there are some good contenders for silverware in this episode. Fourth place goes to Bell’s Two Hearted, a Michigan classic of a generation ago: it’s not a flashy or trendy beer, and it’s probably due a bit of a packaging spruce-up, but it tastes bloody good. Bronze heads to Chicago brewery Pipeworks, who have a vast range of beers, and some cracking labels: the medal goes to Summer of Kwing, a tart gose with salt and lime. The runner-up would have taken first prize in most episodes, so Minneapolis’s Surly Brewing’s Pentagram dark sour ale can count itself very unlucky, but can be proud that it’s an absolutely stonking beer, and it went very well with the pulled pork at their brewery restaurant. The gold heads to another well-known but unflashy Michigan brewery, Founders, and their outstanding Breakfast Stout, which is rich, boozy, laced with coffee, chocolate, and oats, and one of the few in the upper echelons of the ultranerdy Ratebeer Top 250 that’s not borderline impossible to find. A bonus award this episode for Madison, WI’s Karben4 and their Fantasy Factory IPA: the beer itself is decent but not podium-worthy, but any beer label featuring a pistol-toting cat riding a fire-breathing unicorn deserves praise.
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