Niagara to Chicago - A Fond Flyby of Ann Arbor

After spending a good chunk of the morning at Niagara Falls, I decided to drive around Lake Erie on the Canadian side, so I fished out my passport, made an abrupt U-Turn to find an ATM for cash to pay the toll, and drove over the Rainbow Bridge, thus completing my North American trifecta of countries. 

I wasn’t particularly impressed with my day in Canada.  The first thing I did was look up a place for a late breakfast; the IHOP I found proved to be in a huge touristy amusement park called the Clifton Hill Fun Centre, a vast sterile place almost deserted on the cold day, where I had to pay to park and walk back past dinosaur mini-golf installations and giant Haunted House buildings blaring amplified scary voices into the empty street, to find my IHOP breakfast on the third floor of a casino.  After a month of back-road rural life in Cornwall it was a rude, and surreal, reawakening to the modern world.

Well-fed at least, I then spent a long day’s drive on Canada’s Rt. 403 and 401 through the almost featureless farmlands of Ontario.  The shorn brown fields were planted here and there with hundreds of gigantic wind-farm turbines, turning slowly under the grey sky.  I never saw the lake, and at the far end I waited on an hour-long line to re-cross into the USA, while rain and sleet surged over the lanes of stationary cars.  I showed my passport again, answered rather more questions, crossed another bridge, and was in Detroit.  Apologies to Canada: I’m sure it has more to offer!  If it was summer I would go home to Seattle via Banff.

As it was I had one more night en route to Chicago, and no desire to spend it in Detroit, so I booked a room ahead in the town of Ann Arbor Michigan, knowing nothing whatsoever about it.  The little road there (Rt. 12) took me through the bowels of Detroit, confirming my decision with every glimpse of its abandoned, boarded-up brick tenements and sad, shuffling inhabitants.  It was a long inner-city trek, repeatedly held up by traffic lights, but a valuable glimpse of the reality, better than taking the highway. 

Finally out the other side into the suburbs and I was now hungry for dinner, and for some reason conceived a strong desire to go to an Olive Garden restaurant, a franchise I hadn’t visited in perhaps 20 years.  I found my Motel 6, on the southern edge of Ann Arbor, checked in—and found that an Olive Garden was literally across the street from it.  The dinner with its signature salad and breadsticks was as satisfying as I remembered.

My little stay in Ann Arbor was almost miraculously accomodating in that way.  In the morning I went to a nice coffeehouse called Biggby’s, again just down the road from the motel, to make my Niagara Falls blog post, after which I searched Google Maps for a place to get a much-needed haircut, and found one right next door to the coffeehouse.  After that I drove past the University to explore the center of town, and found it a charming cluster of city blocks, two-story Midwestern buildings alternating with handsome brick towers, everything clean and funky with interesting shops and restaurants at every turn.  I had a great burger at an attractive warm-toned restaurant called Avalon, browsed a nice bookstore called Literati Books, and had to tear myself away to begin the drive to Chicago.  In two city block turns I was on the highway, and Ann Arbor was gone behind me.

Avalon restaurant in Ann Arbor
(Note waitress in costume on Halloween)

I was deliberately delaying my arrival in Chicago, because Robb, my host, wouldn’t be home to receive me until 6:00 pm.  So after crossing the wrist of Michigan on the highway and hitting the East coast of Lake Michigan, I pulled off at the Warren Dunes State Park, with a desire to see SOMETHING of a Great Lake.  There it was, teal-blue out to the horizon on a vast beachy stretch of windswept grassy hills.  At the end of October I had the whole place to myself, and on a cold day with the sun coming in rifts through the grey clouds I had a great time wandering the wind-scultped dunes of sand and grass for an hour or so.

Finally it was time to get back in my Miata and fight the evening highways into urban Chicago at rush hour.  How many years had it been since I made this drive?  The familiar silhouette of the Sears Tower emerged against that same backdrop of empty lake sky—but the building is now called something else, and there were strange skyscrapers competing with it.  Robb had promised that the city I once knew would be very changed; I was eager to see.  But having found his address and parked on a side street, and then realized that I had neglected a time crossing and was an hour early, and so had to stand in the cold at the street corner waiting for him, hands jammed in my jacket pockets, I had time to review the wide avenue of three-story brick buildings in palettes of dark orange and brown with bay windows and brick porches, and think to myself that after all Chicago looked just the same.  And finally a figure on the darkening street waved to me, and Robb arrived to let me in.