Day 2: Saturday November 6, 2004

We get up around 9 or 10am. Sarah makes tea and heats up slices of cinnamon bread lathered with frosting. Yum. We get ready and head out. Stop in downtown Birmingham at a beauty supply store and I buy a pink and black headband, because I love headbands, and I love pink and black together. I take Sarah's advice and pass on the little-girl one with the bow, but pick the black one with small pink polka dots.

The Henry Ford Museum
We head out to the Henry Ford Museum. It's out there by a ranch where they have steer, which is a little odd for me to see. There's also another major tourist good old-fashioned-American attraction called Greenfield Village right next to it. As we enter the museum, a loud siren goes off. We're not sure what it is all about - and everyone seems confused by it.

We stop at the cafeteria for lunch. Sarah goes for the pulled BBQ pork and I order cabbage rolls. Faygo soda pop is big in Detroit and Sarah gets Root Beer and I get a flavor called "Rock and Rye" which is a cherry cola. There are lots of kids around, and Sarah says this is the kind of place you go to on a school expedition. I think it is much cooler than that. After lunch we head off to explore.

The museum is amazing. They have huge steam trains as you enter the exhibit. Lots and lots of classic cars, of course, and several presidential vehicles, including the car Kennedy was assassinated in. I stop to take a photo and Sarah poses in front of it, pointing a gun to her head. She cracks up too quickly and I don't quite get the photo right. But we don't take another one as we're feeling a little unsure about giggling around such a serious piece of history. There is also the Reagan car on display, and the windows are all frosted over, due to age or some kind of faded-over-time phenomenon. The sign says the Reagan car is the last presidential vehicle for the museum as all presidential cars after that are destroyed in Secret Service experiments. More stuff: a classic AirStream trailer, a parachuter on roller wheels with fold-up bicycles, and old Ski-Doo snowmobile...probably lots of people know and appreciate the classic American history behind these items, but I don't know what it's all about. We breeze through the exhibits quickly.

There's also a bunch of old airplanes, but we skip that exhibit, and instead head over to the pop culture exhibit where they display various items of pop culture during different decades from the 50's to the 90's. It was a little smaller than I expected, and much of the exhibit was behind glass displays, but still it was fun to see. They had a cool jukebox in their 50's exhibit, a display of 45's as well as an 8 track display. In the 80's display was an old Mac Plus, and the first issue of MacWorld. They also had some kind of blue screen video thing where you could appear in an MTV video. I tried it, but didn't feel like making any dance moves, so moved on.

We stop at an unusual looking display, which turns out to be the Fuller Geodesic dome. Designed by Buckminster Fuller in 1946, this must've been very futuristic in its time. It had some very cool features such as no corners for dust to pile up in, as well as a shelving system with a mechanical shelving unit that rotated. I could use one of those! It was designed to provide economic, efficient housing for people, and must've seemed really futuristic during its time. The kitchen, in spite of being almost 60 years old, looked pretty modern to me. At the end of the tour I asked the guide how many of these domes were made. There were only two made, and I guess none ever sold. They should bring these back - this idea was probably way ahead of its time, and with housing prices the way they are these days...

We're running out of time, so we start to make our way out of the museum. As we head toward an obligatory stop to the museum gift shop, we stop at the Rosa Parks bus. We peer in, uncertain whether we can actually board the bus, and an older man sitting in one of the seats invites us in, and gives us a 20 minute history lesson on Rosa Parks bus. He tells us how the manager of the museum wanted the bus no matter what the cost, and spent over $400,000 to buy the rotting bus in an auction, and another $300,000+ to restore it to the museum-display that we see it in. The display has only been open since early last year. We pose for a photo. Sarah sits in second row the seat next to where Rosa Parks was sitting when she was asked to move. I sit in the front row, in what was the "whites-only" section.

Oddly enough, parked nearby the Rosa Parks bus is the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile. It's right in front of the museum gift shop and we stop in and browse around for a bit. We then head off and drive to Ann Arbor, the college town where Sarah's sister Beth and her husband Rob live. We stop by their house and head out to dinner in downtown Ann Arbor with Beth and Rob, and their two young daughters Sophie and Lucienne. We make the drive back to Birmingham, but first stop by Sarah's mother Julie's house and visit with her and her husband Ron. They're in the middle of remodeling, and their kitchen and back yard is getting torn up. We stay for a bit and finally head back to Sarah's place. Another late night. My pink suede jacket which I've been wearing for the last two days feels trashed and I put in the wash. I try to remind myself to dry it in the morning, but can't remember much as it's late and I'm starting to feel the effects of not enough sleep.

Next > Day 3: Matthew Sweet in the Windy City