2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 15: The Road Home?

 

This is Part 13 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 In my memory, life was much simpler before the tech revolution. For a traveller, the halcyon days were those that came after the invention of accurate paper maps, and before the invention of GPS. Paper maps work every time you look at them. They do not issue ludicrous instructions, they do not freeze up for no reason, they do not require a signal of any kind to operate, they do not suddenly go blank, they do not change from moment to moment. True, there's a lot they can't do: they can't tell you if the road is closed or if there's been an accident up ahead. They can't warn you of a speed trap along your way. And they can't tell you what restaurants or motels are along your route, or how much they cost.

I'll take that trade.

Anyway. So saying, in yesterday's post, that I would finish with Michigan around noon and start for home proved to be a little optimistic. After Google Maps threatened several times to send me down gravel roads I just pulled up a map of the state, figured out where I wanted to go, and then looked for paved roads that would take me there. That worked, at a glance. I also enjoyed, for a change, having at least some picture in my head of where things are in relation to each other, in the thumb of Michigan's mitten. And at 2:20 pm I sailed into Sanilac County, the last of the 83 that make up the state. Thirty-seven states down, thirteen to go.

And now I'm torn. I've already skipped Wills St Clair Auto Museum -- that was easy; it was closed -- and Stahl's Automotive Foundation -- that was harder; it's only open on Tuesdays, and today's Tuesday -- and Marvin's Marvelous Museum, and the Roush Automobile Collection, the National Construction Equipment Museum (it would have been closed by the time I got there), Stroh's Center (home of the world's largest bronze falcon sculpture), Snook's Dream Cars, the Fostoria Rail Park and the Fostoria Glass Heritage Center; and the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation. Some of those things I'm more disappointed at not seeing than others. And tomorrow I know I'm going to skip almost all the stops I'd planned on. (I did try to buy some moonshine here in Ohio, but the supermarket I went to didn't have any. I will find some tomorrow, I hope.)

I don't mind so much skipping all the places I'd planned to stop, back when I was just planning the trip. They're all things I can go to some other time, and to be honest most of them aren't worth the forty cents worth of gas it might take to get a photograph. They were just there, near where I was going to be anyway. The thing I'm torn about is: do I just get on the freeway and go home, or do I get off the freeway when I cross into Kentucky, and wander through the five counties I need just southeast of Cincinnati, and then the three in the middle of the state, and then the two in western Tennessee before I get back on the freeway? Or do I just stay on the freeway. That is the only thing on my mind. (That, and the British Transportation Museum in Dayton, which isn't actually open tomorrow but they say tours can be arranged outside their regular hours. If I could just get hold of them....)

So. Today I stopped at a sculpture museum and garden in Saginaw -- well, first I stopped for breakfast at a Bob Evans restaurant where something was going wrong in the kitchen; they were way behind and people were complaining and cancelling their orders and leaving. I, having lots of emails to read, didn't really notice until a certain point when I realized that I'd already had my allotted three cups of coffee and still hadn't gotten any food. It came shortly after so I wasn't too upset. Not like the guy behind me at the cash register a few minutes later. Then I went to an auto parts store seven miles down the street -- there was a much closer one, but Google Maps chose not to so inform me -- to find out why my Check Engine light had come on. (As I'd expected, a slight vacuum leak. It's been that every time but once since the invention of the vague Check Engine light, and except for that one time it's meant the gas cap didn't get tightened all the way, and the warning light goes out after a while. So far it hasn't gone out, but at least I'm not too worried about it.) And then I went to the sculpture garden.

Black Elk, the Lakota philosopher

 It's located at Saginaw Valley State University, and features the work of a local guy named Marshall Fredericks, who made good in the Art World. He was popular with auto-industry executives. Big, monumental sculptures in well-known places like Cleveland and Europe. The indoor gallery is mostly filled with plaster casts and scale models of works, while the garden outside has a number of full-sized pieces. 

There are also four fake swans in the pond out there. I only knew they were fake because one of them tipped over. 

Pointe Aux Barques Light

From there I made my way up the thumb of the mitten to Pointe Aux Barques, the second-most-dangerous area of the Great Lakes for shipping, to see the old lighthouse.

And from there I made my way through Detroit (which, to my surprise, has a lot of new high-rise construction downtown) and Toledo to Lima, Ohio for the night, where I will ponder my course for tomorrow.

2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 14: winding down

 

This is Part 12 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 So I guess I didn't need to spend all that time at the Gilmore complex of car museums: on Labor Day Weekend, all of Michigan is a car show. There were several in the parking lot of my hotel last night, and today I saw at least 40 old cars on the road, including a rare 1927 Alfa Romeo. 

It's just not the same, though. You don't get the chance to really look them over when they zip past you on the highway.

All I did today was drive, from Cadillac, to Clare, then up to Petosky and through the Tunnel of Trees. It wasn't looking good when I left the hotel: 48 degrees and cloudy; but by the time I got to the scenic drive along Lake Michigan, it was clear and around 70. So, perfect. 

Of course, last night I'd carefully re-routed the Google Maps instructions to keep me on the shoreline -- it kept trying to take me on a direct route, which would have been a bore -- before sending it to my phone. Then, today, it had apparently decided that I didn't want to waste all that time driving a scenic route when there's a perfectly good road from Point A direct to Point B. So for the entire trip I kept hearing "In a quarter-mile, make a right." Until I lost the GPS signal. And then I hit the spot where the road was closed and I had to go back to one of those ignored right turns.

remains of a 1905 shipwreck

I saw a couple of lighthouses and a shipwreck, and that's about it. There were some Adirondack chairs set out by the first lighthouse, so I took that opportunity for a five-minute nap. Very refreshing.

I've been to 15 of the 20 counties I needed in Michigan; tomorrow I'll get those last five and then start for home. I have, I see, about a dozen car museums on the return trip. I can guarantee I will not be stopping at those places (with one possible exception). There's a glass museum on the route, too, but at this point, who cares? I wanna go home. So I expect I will finish my Michigan county-counting before noon tomorrow, then get on the freeway and start home. I'll be stopping at a supermarket in Ohio to stock up on moonshine, and if it can be arranged I'll be stopping at the British Transportation Museum in Dayton; and other than that I will be driving as far as my little roller skate will carry me tomorrow.

Oh, and two things I've forgotten. First, the most interesting photo I took at the Gilmore Museum Complex:

1957 Isetta and 1960 Lincoln

And the other thing is about the price of gas, since a few people have wondered about it. I use premium gas in the Jag, and while I know what I've paid, I don't know what it is at stations where I didn't stop, since they don't advertise premium's price; just regular. When I left San Antonio regular gas was going for about $3.59/gallon. In North Texas it was about ten cents less, and in Oklahoma and Kansas about another ten cents a gallon less. In fact, the price kept going down as the trip progressed, until I hit Illinois. In Sabula, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, regular gas was $3.24 a gallon; four miles away, in Savanna, Illinois, it was $3.90. When I bought gas in Illinois the next day, around Dixon, regular was $3.59. (Premium seems to run about 70 cents a gallon more, consistently.) Interestingly, in Michigan, it has varied from $3.59 in the southern part, around Kalamazoo, to $3.89 in the more remote areas up north. But I chanced on a station somewhere east of Cadillac, a BP station, that sold it for $3.29; my premium gas there was less than the regular gas at the station before, or the station after. Don't know why. Of course, my last fill up this evening was at $4.70/gallon, but then the next station I passed had it for $4.39. I don't know if prices back home have come down since I left, but I hope so.

2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 13: Into the Wild

 

This is Part 11 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 Sojourner Truth, it turns out, lived the last 20-plus years of her life in Battle Creek, Michigan; so before I went back out to the Gilmore Museum this morning, I stopped downtown to see her monument. It's a twelve-foot-tall statue of her preaching, which she did a lot of, in a small park near the City Hall.

That's pretty much the only point of interest in the city of Battle Creek. Well, there's a Historical Bridge somewhere on the east side of town, and an arboretum, but I wasn't willing to make time for either of those things. I suppose if I ever come back here with my wife, I'll have to go to the arboretum, and maybe I'll go see the bridge, too. But there were cars to see, lots of 'em, so back up to Hickory Corners.

I did, as expected, go back to the Model A Museum, mainly to get a picture of the Model A Town Car, marketed to women "of a certain position in society" who didn't give a shit about what people thought. And to those who insist on being dropped off right in front of places where a bigger limo won't fit. You would have to really not care about the opinion of others to be seen being driven around by a chauffeur in that little limo. That's kind of like taking a sack lunch to Maxim's.

I started today where I'd left of yesterday, and finished photographing the newer Lincolns. 

You know what, I'm going to just be brief. I spent 6 hours today, walking around the immense grounds of the Gilmore museum complex; I went to the Lincoln Museum, the Model A Museum, the Cadillac-LaSalle Museum, the Steam Room (horseless carriages, mostly), the something-or-other Barn, the Classic Car Club of America Museum ("full classics," meaning cars for snobs from a long time ago -- according to them, there have been no classics made since 1948), the Pierce-Arrow Museum, and a couple of others that I don't remember the name of. I saw cars. Hundreds and hundreds of cars. I took hundreds and hundreds of pictures, most of which I'm disappointed with because of the lighting in all those buildings, but some are good. Look in my picture album from this trip if it interests you. At this point, at 11PM in a motel room in Cadillac, Michigan, where it's 48 degrees and I'm ready for bed, I'm not going to elaborate. I loved it. I'm glad I went there, I'm glad I went back, and I'm glad I'm done with it and now I'm going to wander around the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and then head home. 

1948 Jaguar 3.5 Litre coupe

(I will say that there was one Jaguar car the CCCA calls a "full classic," the 1948 3.5 Litre. I can think of two later ones: the 1949 XK-120 and the 1961 E-Type. Oh, and the Mark X, but I don't recall what year that came out. In the '60s, I believe. Hell, if they can call the 1949 Cadillac a "full classic," then anything can be a "full classic.")

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2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 12

This is Part 10 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

So, I'm in the Eastern time zone now. My phone knows that automatically; my computer and my car don't know it at all. I haven't told them. Me, I'm somewhere in between: I know it, but sometimes I forget. Like this morning, when I was planning my day after a frustrating evening of not having usable wi-fi, and a poor night's sleep. I thought long and hard about going to the Air Zoo before heading out to the car museums in Hickory Corners, but after full consideration decided that the Air Zoo would be a zoo on a Saturday morning. It sounds like fun for young and old, but in my experience that means a lot of standing around watching kids have fun and wishing they weren't there. I mean, it's not like they're my kids. And I'm sure they're all badly behaved.

So I decided to pass on the Air Zoo. I figured I'd just run by the local university campus to see a statue in front of the stadium called The Committee, and then up to the museums, which open at 9AM. I finished the frustrating task of checking through yesterday's pictures, and captioning them, and then I finished writing Part 9 of this blog. I posted it, and got to the car just a little later than I'd planned. I'd figured that 8:30 would be a good time to leave this morning, and when I shut down the computer it said 8:45. Close enough.

Except, of course, that that was 8:45 Central, and as I mentioned, I'm now in Eastern time. Oh, well, not really much I could have done about it. I couldn't have finished the post any faster, though I could have skipped the hotel breakfast, and gotten a big cup of coffee on the way instead of three little cups, one at a time. That would have saved me three or four minutes.

So I drove over to the university. Statue's not there by the stadium. I checked the listing again and confirmed its reported location. Asked three people who seemed familiar with the campus. None of them knew what statue I was talking about. Didn't really care that much, so I blew it off and went up to Hickory Corners, which is, I guess you'd say, a village northeast of Kalamazoo, northwest of Battle Creek. (I moved to a hotel in Battle Creek because the one I was in last night was such a dump; this one's a noticeably better class of dump.) (No, that's not fair. This one's actually OK so far; what you'd expect of a 2-star hotel.)

I went to Hickory Corners thinking there were five separate car museums (Gilmore, Lincoln, Franklin, Cadillac and Classics), all on the same campus. Turns out that's a little understated. There are those five ... plus the Pierce-Arrow Museum and the Model A Museum and the Campania Barn, a museum of cars from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. And a bunch of other things. Motorcycles. Pedal cars. Carriages. Steam cars.

So if you're not interested in my extended musings on car styling and such, you might as well just skip the rest of this blog post, because I stayed at the museum until my phone's battery gave out from all the pictures, and I traded my museum ticket for a two-day pass, because I'm going back tomorrow to see the rest of it. 

And that, by the way, will pretty much be it for car museums on this trip. I'm actually glad of that. I'm looking forward to getting in the car tomorrow afternoon and just driving up and down the state of Michigan, not having the least concern about whether someplace is going to be open when I get there or not. All I've got to do is pick a road at every intersection and eventually end up in San Antonio. The weather has been glorious since Oklahoma; I've felt not a drop of rain nor any temperature above 87 degrees. I could live like this.

just for context

The first gallery in the Gilmore was a special exhibit of Corvettes. Having just been to a Corvette museum in Texas, I got through that one quickly: a couple of wide shots for context, plus one picture of an interesting variation, the Bubble Top Corvette. (The bubble top was an after-market product usable on Corvettes with removable hardtops. It looks as silly as it sounds, unless you still think the Jetson's vehicle is cool.)

(And, once again, let me apologise for the quality of the pictures I took today, & probably for the ones I'm going to take tomorrow. The spotlighting in the Gilmore and its associated museums is not really conducive to quality photographs. Might as well park the cars next to a big window.)

1934 Auburn V-12 line-up

The next gallery might be one of my favourites of the ones I saw today. Or any day. First thing I saw when I walked in was a stunning Duesenburg J-111 phaeton, royal blue and black. I took several pictures of it before I noticed that, just across the aisle from it, were five 1934 Auburn V-12s, all painted in the same understated grey and black colours. The cars were identical from the front bumper to the windshield, but represented all five available models: speedster, brougham, phaeton, sedan and cabriolet. (If you're wondering what those names mean, compare the roof lines on those five cars.) I've never seen such a line-up of cars before. All five are on loan to the museum by a local couple. I have to wonder what's left in their garage.

I spent a lot of time going back and forth among those five cars, but eventually forced myself to move on. That entire gallery shows cars from that era, and almost all of them are fabulous, but after the Duesenburg and the five Auburns ... and the Packard 12, of course, and the Chrysler Royal, and the Chrysler LeBaron Imperial, and one of the two Rolls Royces (built in America, mind you) (the other, a Phantom I Torpedo, being so ugly I didn't even bother to photograph it; can you imagine?), and the '37 Cadillac Imperial convertible.... Well, the other cars just seemed kind of ordinary. A '34 De Soto Airflow; saw one the other day. Essex Terraplane; big deal. Packard Custom 8? Saw it in Salt Lake City.

So ordinary... 1951 Studebaker

Next up: cars from the '50s & '60s. When I was very young, I used to see cars like these on the streets all the time. Mostly in poorer neighbourhoods, because by the time I was old enough to identify a car, these were almost all old rattletraps and junkers. Cars didn't last as long back then. But of course the examples on show in the museum have been cleaned up some. The gallery's display starts with the basic Chevy starter car, then moves on to slightly more upscale cars. There were a couple of Mercuries -- a Montclair and the top-of-the-line Turnpike Cruiser -- and a whole lot of other cars that I didn't photograph because, by then, my battery was running down and ... well, I'd seen 'em. Just for spite they threw in the 1963 Chrysler Turbine, a research model that was too expensive to actually mass-produce, but one that's so famous I've probably seen a thousand pictures of it. Now I've seen the actual car. And the room finishes with one of my absolute favourite cars of all, a 1963 Buick Riviera. I want one.

Just off to the side of that gallery is the Muscle Car Gallery. I went in there expecting not to take any pictures because, as I said, my battery was running down, and muscle cars are standard displays in every car museum. I figured it'd just be more of the same, having been to so many car museums in the last two weeks. And I was right: a bunch of 'Cudas and GTOs, some Mustangs, Camaros, Dodge Coronets souped up and stamped with Super-Bee logos ... yeah, yeah, seen that. I did take a picture of one muscle car, a '68 Mercury Cyclone GT, just because I'd never seen one. Everyone I knew that had that kind of car had the Ford Torino version, which as far as I can see is identical. 

And then there was this:

The Perfect Driveway

I want one of each. Except I want them in black.

I moved on to the next museum, the Franklin Museum. I had never realised, somehow, that Franklins were air-cooled; I just always thought they were funny-looking. They didn't need a big radiator and all the machinery that pushes coolant around the engine. They were a little more expensive to build, consequently more expensive to buy, but they were excellent cars, especially if you lived in the Southwest, where cars tended to overheat. Franklins never overheat where there's air. 

(I'm reminded of my first trip to San Diego on Interstate 8, where the shoulder of the highway is lined with big tubs of water for radiators. And my first trip through Death Valley, in 1999, and all the cautions we heard about going back up to sea level: Watch your guage! Open the windows! Turn off the air conditioner! Pull over!)

So anyway; Franklins were always different looking. Odd. Owners were sensitive to the teasing they got, especially if they had one of the models that tended towards ugly. Dealers complained that the weird-looking styling of the front ends affected sales. They were probably right. But Franklin's head guy refused to abandon his form-follows-function philosophy, until he did, in 1925, when the new Franklins were suddenly adorned with a front end that looked like every other car on the road.

1928 Lincoln convertible sedan

After Franklin, Lincoln. The Lincoln Motor Company was started by Henry Leland, the same guy who started Cadillac more than ten years before. After a rough couple of years, it went belly-up and was bought in a foreclosure sale by Henry Ford. Ford gave it to his boy Edsel to run. The two Henry's had some history together: Henry L had been instrumental in forcing Henry F out of his first car company; now the shoe was on the other foot. It wasn't long before Henry F forced Henry L out of Lincoln. Edsel seemed to have a knack for the luxury car business, and within a decade Lincoln was playing with the Big Boys.

Lincolns had a rep for quality engineering, and Edsel had a good sense of what the luxury-car-buying public wanted. He was responsible for the Lincoln Zephyr, a very successful and stylistically bold line, and then the Continental, which started out elegant, then got even more elegant, then got ... well, maybe not ugly, exactly, but odd; and back and forth in a pattern that seems still ongoing. Of course, Edsel died somewhere in there, so he's only responsible for that first (elegant) Continental. 

At that point in my day, my phone's battery was on its last legs. I did go over to the Model A Museum, because I knew I wouldn't want to take any pictures there ... except I did, and will probably go back with a full battery tomorrow to do that.