The day started with a Seattle tour, run by one of the folks who works at the hostel & who seems to be the person who organises a lot of the social stuff.

There was this tour, and the cookies & games thing another night, and an event recognising the recipients of a Hostelling International scholarship/grant to … go traveling. That last one, to be honest, was mostly popular because of the free beer & wine & food.

I ended up chatting with a couple of wandering educators; One at what I think was tertiary level, and one in the ESOL space.

Both interesting guys, though history about Seattle, and Redlining, and The Pine Box from one couldn’t hold a candle to the Illuminati/Reptile People/David Iche(?)/Hillary Clinton Is A Witch coming from the other guy.

The tour took in a really big market/grocery/bookstore near the hostel, including some of the history of the founder, who’d been forced out of business by being of Japanese ancestry during WW2, and being forced to move out of the area.
Then there was a museum of the Klondike Gold Rush, which was also a National Park inside a building.
This led through Pioneer Square, site of the more successful settlement¹ which became Seattle, via a bust of Chief Seattle/Si’ahl, then past a monument² to the starting of the Great Seattle Fire, to end up at Pike Place Market.

¹ This was covered in the boat trip too, and I suspect there’s detail missing, but the gist of the thing is that the original settlers hadn’t picked a good spot. After a while, Chief Seattle suggested that they move to somewhere less dumb, and they did.
Then named the city after him.
² It’s a representation of cabinetry & a pot of glue.
You just can’t make this stuff up.

From Pike Place, I ambled down & got onto a one-hour harbour cruise.
Of which this is apparently the only photo I took.

Well, it’s a harbour; I’m sure you know what those look like.

It does have Super-post-Panamax cranes, a cruise ship terminal they built out of hope which eventually paid off, and a whole lot of little parks thanks to a city councilwoman who was very keen on actual green space.
They also mentioned that, despite the reputation, Seattle isn’t even in the top 50 cities in the US for rainfall. It does, however, rain or drizzle almost every day.

The tour was fun, and they did another one from nearby Lake Union back to the waterfront via a set of locks, so I did that one too.

This one had floating houses in a profusion of colour schemes.
Also a tour narrator who was going with a riff of all of the folks we could see being part of the tour, who were required to wave back to us, and indeed were there just for that purpose.

Gas Works Park, which … was formerly a gas works.
That’s why it’s called that.

Brightly coloured tugboats, from the days when whoever got there first got the contract, so the companies would go with very distinctive colour schemes so that any ship owner who happened to like them could identify the boat & steer their way.

The Fremont Bridge, which opens 35 times a day on average.

Tiny Little Yellow Tugboat

And the locks.
It was one of the deckhand/bartender’s first time doing the ‘tying-up’ bit at the dock, so there was the scene of the Captain leaning over the rail to talk her through it, then an announcement & congratulations afterwards.

You can just see it out of this window; There’s a floating wall attached to the side of the lock.
The boat ties to that, and it keeps the same level, presumably so that you’re not having to adjust rope length all of the time.

I retreated from the burning assault of the Day-Star at this point.
For a cloudy city, it was damn sunny that day.

Yes, I did photograph the West Point Light, in part, because it looks like it’s the lighthouse from Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” music video.

And What Of It?

Misc scenic, filtered through glass and salt-spray.

A California Sea Lion.
Apparently the process by which they get onto the buoy is … not dignified … and takes a number of tries.

The possibly-visible globe there is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Globe, left behind when the newspaper of that name moved out of the building. It’s now an Official City Landmark.

 

So, summing up?
It was nice to spend a day, or at least chunks of it, out on the water.
Managed to not get sunburned by moving downstairs when it got too bright out there, so I’m calling that a win.

Everyone in the universe was in Seattle this weekend, it seems, with PAX West, a Mariners Baseball game, and a few conventions or conferences, so I found a place out by the airport.

Hostelworld was convinced that there were no hostel beds in the city that weekend, and hotel prices were eye watering, so I got allegedly creative; Airport hotels tend to be a bit cheaper, and in many places it’s easy to get to the airport.

The Fairfield Inn actually has a free shuttle to do airport pickups and dropoffs, but it was a strait shot down the road from the terminal train station, and around a mile, so I walked it.

Room’s nice.

The view … Well, it serves as a constant reminder of our ability to move people around.

I’ll be honest; Bugger-all happened.

I did a couple of blog posts, got my paper journal up to date (writing on the train was challenging thanks to jolting, and my handwriting is bad enough already), and got some of the audio editing I’d planned to do on the train out of the way.

I did leave the hotel a few times.

• Lunch/Dinner at the IHOP down the road
• Lunch at the Denny’s down the road in the other direction
• A general-purpose wander on Saturday night. Not being sure of how far was sensible at night, it wasn’t much of a wander, though it was nice to experience evening temperatures which made me think “a warmer shirt wouldn’t be a bad thing”.

The evening wander did allow me to find out that the hotel had complimentary cookies, to go with the in-lobby coffee & hot water (and hot chocolate sachets), which made editing a more nummy experience.

And I slept.
Didn’t sleep so well on the train this time around; Not sure why, though the jolting can’t have been helping.

I could have taken the shuttle back to Sea-Tac when I checked out, but it was a pleasantly cool & non-sunny, so I walked it again, detouring through the airport to be nosy & get a coffee.
There was a guy wandering around singing a few bars of “Tomorrow” from Annie; Wasn’t sure whether he wanted people to join in, but he was ahead of me on the concourse, so not an option.

 

First, let’s get this out of the way;

Where the fuzzy hell was this a week ago?
I was at Union Station, looking at the display of route guides, and I would have noticed it.

Please don’t tell me that I started a trend of going to Kalamazoo.

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I’d packed up the night before, as much as was possible, so Thursday morning was pretty easy.
Naturally, I didn’t sleep well, because APPARENTLY I hate being well-rested for a trip. Or something.

This Is Likely To Be Picture-Heavy, So … Bear That In Mind Before Clicking HERE To Show The Rest Of The Post

The thing about getting on a train when it’s still dark, having gotten up at Oh Dear God AM, is that you tend to hit your seat & sleep. Or at least I do.

I did find that the overhead racks, on this train at least, were big enough to hold Big Red with ease, which simplified things enormously.

I also found that it’s possible to doze off partway through using the Facebook app on your phone, and wake up to find it finishing the transition into French Language.
Didn’t expect that.

 

Back at the Freehand Hostel, in a lower bunk this time.
They’re marginally easier to get into, but still not that dignified.
Not sure whether it was just this bunk, but the ‘roof’ was decorated with pages from a road atlas, which was fun.

 

I didn’t get up to much in the few days I was here before my train to Seattle.
I mean, I’m sure I did something, but I’m not sure what it was. I’ll check the paper diary, and see whether it was anything worth mentioning. It could have been something as dull as ‘enjoying non-muggy weather’, which was fun at the time, but not exactly travel-blog worthy.

Had a couple of roommates; Dale, who was here for a Cubs game or two, and was having what looked like a hell of a good time, and probably John from Germany, an exchange student who was seeing a bit more of the US before heading back home.

Not sure whether this photo came out all that well, but there was low-lying cloud obscuring buildings, which was quite fun.

On a Sunday which threatened rain but held off on actually delivering it where such a thing could be inconvenient, we went to The Henry Ford, which combines a ‘standard’ museum with a … living history museum?

Greenfield Village is a bit tricky to describe.

We ought to know more about the families who founded this nation, and how they lived. One way to do that is to reconstruct as nearly as possible the conditions under which they lived.
~ Henry Ford

It started as a way to show how things used to be, and there’s a certain element of nostalgia running through it.
But it’s also a collection of mostly American history; The Wright Brothers bicycle shop is here.
And it has working glassblowers, weavers, steam locomotives, tinsmiths, etc.

We had a go at pushing the turntable, which was surprisingly easy for something 70′ long that weighs 48 tonnes. Once it’s moving, it wants to keep moving, and the only real effort was in the starting & the stopping.
The Docent in the photo, besides having his mustache waxed into points, talked about having turned up to his job interview with a photo of six-year-old him at the opening of the Roundhouse. In his day job, he’s a trainee history teacher.

 

Various pictures inside the roundhouse, which is operating as intended, as a storage & maintenance facility.
Also, it has a cat, probably named Marshall, who takes care of the rodent population.
And occasionally visits other parts of the Village.
And once set off the alarms at the Wright House by sneaking in and falling asleep on the bed.

 

You can wander around under 100 tonnes of locomotive, which is a new one on me; I’ve never seen one from this angle before.

 

The Docents are all very into their area; The powerhouse guy was partway through a piece on DC vs. AC & 110V vs. 220V when we got there, and it was pretty technical, but also interesting.
Hadn’t known, for example, that in the early days the only thing you could use electricity for was light, as there were no appliances yet.

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On the basis of some threatening weather, we moved inside, to the Henry Ford Museum.

Unsurprisingly, they had cars.

 

 

They also have the only Dymaxion House, originally assembled from two prototypes & lived in for 20 years, then rebuilt into an approximation of the intended house by the museum folk after it was donated.
The folks who lived in it had it as an add-on to a more conventional structure, and it looked liked someone had materialised a UFO in a regular house.

 

There are some spots left unfinished, to show off the central support & modular bathroom.

The idea was that it’d be a two bedroom two bathroom home, with fireplace, motorised revolving storage system in place of shelves (a loop of shelf-baskets inside the wall), and a dust-proof hat-rack in the front hall closet, because that’s what every house needs.

 

Surprisingly for this place, not the original.
It’s a replica built for the 100th anniversary.
Bigger than I’d imagined; All the stories mention how small it was, and how the first flight was shorter than the wingspan of a 747, and so on, but … it’s pretty big.
I’d also not known why they chose Kitty Hawk as a location; Turns out it’s the town nearest to what is now the town of Kill Devil Hills, where there is a beach with predictable winds, flat surfaces, and not a lot to run into.
There was a Docent in the Wright Bicycle Shop who was able to explain what looked like a photo taken of the Flyer in mid-air from another aircraft, which made me wonder how it was taken; Turns out they’d launched from a dune or bluff, past the camera, and what looked like a house & barn in fields was actually a couple of tents on a beach.

 

And here’s the bus Rosa Parks sat down in.
I’m amazed that they kept it, or at least were able to identify it.

The Docent did point out the specific seat; I did not sit in it. Didn’t feel right that I should do so.

 

Took this one just because of the styling of the Texaco truck there; At some point, I shall look up what it was for.
~googles~
OK, tanker truck. Very stylish tanker truck.

 

And finally, a locomotive so damn big that I couldn’t photograph it in a way that captured it’s size.

The structure to the left of the engine is stairs leading up to the (enormous) cab.
The little pale smudge above that structure is a person’s head & shoulders as they walk in; I could stand comfortably in there, and had to reach up to touch the ceiling.

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And finally, on the way back, a drink at Atwater In The Park, a brewery in a (former) church.
I had a cider, though, in deference to the city, it was their Detroit Cider.

Most of the Detroit content, to be honest, is in the Henry Ford post.
What’s in here are a few photos and some things I noticed.

On the way back from The Henry Ford, we stopped in at Atwater in the Park, a craft brewery in a former church.
I had a cider, though, in deference to it being Detroit, it was their ‘Detroit’ cider.

 

Sitting on a shelf in among the games was something I recognised, and have actually played; For the record, that is my arm, and not a leg or something.

 

The process of leaving Detroit involved not leaving from Detroit, but rather from Dearborn.
One of the folks who very kindly drove to Kalamazoo to meet me, arranged housing while there, and took me back to stay at their house, also got up at Oh Dear God in the morning to take me to the train station near their work; Dearborn.

The station, which is new, is rather nice; They’re going for a design that reminds you of classic stations, with the arches & stonework.

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And because it wouldn’t be a post about Detroit without mentioning it; Yes, there were places where one side of the road looked like a different city than the other.
In at least one case it’s because it actually is a different city, but it’s sort of jarring to see.

Other parts of the city put me in mind of, oddly, Taumarunui in 2004, when I was there for a job interview.
You had immaculately maintained places next to houses which were only held up by the paint, and this had the same vibe, with the amplitude turned up until the knob fell off.

I took no pictures, partly because we were in a car, but mostly because there enough pictures out there of Detroit for “City Falling Apart” stories.
Something I wish I’d had the camera ready for were community get-togethers we saw; Clusters of those pop-up gazebo things & people trying to get a … something … happening.

My original scheme for getting to Detroit would have involved arriving at 0030h, then catching a taxi to a hotel, and meeting up with the Detroit folks in the morning.
While the words ‘stupid and insane’ didn’t get used, there was a vibe, so we met up in Klamazoo instead.

I should point out that, until recently, I didn’t know it was a real place. I’d heard the name, but it sounds like one of those names they make up for children’s books or to sound funny & interesting, like Timbuktu or Boise or Ottumwa or Te Hihi.
Turns out that I wasn’t the only one in NZ who thought this, thanks to the wonder of Facebook.
Also thanks to Facebook, Bell’s was recommended by Mikey Mason, doubling the things I knew about the place in one easy step.

This isn’t the Kalamazoo Station; It’s Niles, Michigan, but it has a similar feel to it.
At the actual station I was too busy trying to lug Big Red around to take pictures.

The friends from Detroit had lined up a B&B, which turned out to be rather nice and quite historic. With a very friendly dog with an infinite supply of dog-slobber.

Dinner that night was at the Olde Peninsula Brewpub & Restaurant.
There’s a theme here, by the way, with brewpubs, because you don’t seem to be able to throw a rock in Kalamazoo without hitting one.

Lunch the next day, after we wandered around and saw the various historic houses of Kalamazoo, was at a different brewpub, chosen on the basis of “which of the three we can see from here should we go to?”, and was Gonzo’s Biggdogg Brewing Company.

This thing was sitting in a park, by a wee river/canal which they’re having a good go at gentrifying.
No idea what it is, other than “One Of Those”.

There was also this classic, and probably original, piece of Americana.

And then there was Bell’s.

Somewhere along the way we stopped into the Kalamazoo public library, which had the whole community centre thing happening, with a secondhand bookstore & legal references & the like.
There was also a copy of a book I’d not known existed, by an artist whose work I’ve seen around; Simon Stålenhag.
Tales From The Loop is the book, and it’s … a cross between an art book and an SF story. Maybe a bit like the old Terran Trade Authority books?

Along with driving & walking around Kalamazoo, we also took a trip to South Haven, via a side-of-the-road rib joint.

The odd thing about South Haven, for me, is that it looks like the sort of marina & breakwater & so on that I’m used to, but it’s subtly wrong because there’s no allowance for tides. Lake Michigan is sufficiently large that it resembles a calm blue ocean, or at least it did that day.

On the way out of town, there was a stop for Sweetwater’s Donuts, which we’d been told were the best donuts in town.

They were pretty damn good, and well worth getting wet for.

 

 

My accommodation for this one is the Freehand Chicago, a hostel which is trying to ride that line between Hostel & Hotel.
In practice, this means that there’s a coffee place and cocktail bar on the ground floor, an ensuite bathroom in every room and towels which are replace approximately daily, 4-bed air-conditioned dorms with non-squeaking non-shaking wooden bunks & privacy curtains, and a general feel of very carefully designed bohemian charm.

It’s in a 17-story building, so the stairwell (yes, there’s a lift or two, but it was often faster to walk down) is impressive.

At one point during the stay a letter appeared in the room to lket us know that they were upgrading the door lock system, and that we’d need to get our prox-cards re-keyed at some point. I wasn’t sure when that point would be, exactly, and got a false alarm when my card no longer worked in the elevator, but that turned out to be because I’d extended my stay.
This was how I knew;

Also; It’s worth mentioning that the prox-cards themselves were fun.

There were, over the time I was there, a range of room-mates, from India, Sudan/Oman/Canada (one guy), Sweden, Germany, USA (briefly, she moved rooms after only a few hours¹), and Germany again.

¹ We (A woman from Germany, the second German to have that bunk, and I) did get concerned that she’d shown up, grabbed her bag from her bed (she’d left it there earlier, when I was the only other one in the room) , and left again with a “see you later”, having asked about locks for the lockers. Then never showed up again.
If something had happened to her outside of the hostel, with her gear with her, be it foul play or bad luck, it could be a really long time before anyone knew she was gone. It’s the big downside of travel & transient roommates, I think.
I enquired when I checked out, and it turned out that she’d reported that there was something wrong with the bed², according to the hostel management system, so she’d been moved to another room.

² I’m wondering whether it was more of a ‘something wrong with the room-mates’ issue.
Could be that she’d not realised that she’d booked a mixed dorm.

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Soooo, Chicago.
I tried for a shot with the Chicago Tribune building in the background.
Managed it, but it’s not like the lettering is as readable as I’d hoped for.

Said building has stones from all around the world, and in at least one case not from this world at all, embedded in it.
There’s no specific mention of the stones having been made off with while nobody was looking, but it’s a fun thought; Valiant reporters nicking stones under cover of darkness, and smuggling them back to their HQ.
But to what sinister end?

And could these be the poor unfortunates who returned stoneless?

Well, no.
They’re outside a completely different building.

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I decided to re-visit the Field Museum, and because I’m dim, I walked there.
On a hot sunny day.
In jeans.
Because I’m clever.

As such, the very energetic fountain (which can be seen in one of the boat trip photos I took) was a welcome break from the heat; That mist plume goes a really long way,

There were many things to see in the museum, including Terracotta Warriors, a soil’s-eye-view of … well, soil, and a 3D movie about Sue the T-Rex.
Who has definitely spotted those people.

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There was the finest cuisine Chicago had to offer.

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There’s Navy Pier, which … Is basically an elongated food court with a convention centre at the end and a big-ass ferris wheel on top.
I met someone from Austin, TX, at the free breakfast in the hostel who was in town for a gardening convention on Navy Pier, and had ended up at the Freehand because a room was cheaper by far than any of the nearby hotels.

The Illinois State Flag is rather letting the side down here; Stars & Stripes and Chicago flag are doing their bit for visibility, and Illinois … not so much.

The building out there is not a mirage, magical faerie pavillion, or in Michigan; It’s the intake structure for the water supply, placed far out into the lake in an effort, back when this was more of an issue, to have less of the city’s output in it’s input.

And there is one hell of a view from the end of the pier, looking back, if you can get the light right.
I’m pretty happy with this one.

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I did a bunch of wandering around; Never did use the metropolitan rail system.
Thanks to it being as humid as all hell, sticking to the shade became important, so river walkways were my friend.

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This cake, I’m assuming, marks a battle between an experimental submarine and a previously unknown species of giant freshwater octopus, presumably out on Lake Michigan.

I’m guessing it happened during one of the two World’s Fairs they had here, and which are represented on the flag with a red star each; No point in doubling-up on the stars if they happened at the same time and were related events.

This was mentioned during a boat trip I took;
The city ran the 1933 World’s Fair for two years. It was the Depression, and the thing was bringing in people and money and jobs.

Originally, the fair was scheduled only to run until November 12, 1933, but it was so successful that it was opened again to run from May 26 to October 31, 1934.
The fair was financed through the sale of memberships, which allowed purchases of a certain number of admissions once the park was open. More than $800,000 was raised in this manner as the country came out of the Great Depression. A $10 million bond was issued on October 28, 1929, the day before the stock market crashed. By the time the fair closed in 1933, half of these notes had been retired, with the entire debt paid by the time the fair closed in 1934.
For the first time in American history, an international fair had paid for itself. In its two years, it had attracted 48,769,227 visitors.

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Then there was the day it rained.

This was very exciting; There was even thunder & lightning.
Some of this I heard, and some I saw, when it became apparent that the dickhead in the bunk under mine was just going to keep hitting ‘snooze’ on his cellphone alarm, so I got up.

It was raining a lot; I got … not quite soaked, but in the ‘do I need a dry shirt?’ territory, by walking 2½ sides of a block while trying to stay undercover.

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The day I visited “The Bean”, sometimes known as the Cloud Gate.
It’s fantastic for taking self-portraits, as many people here are demonstrating.

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Another day I wandered along the Magnificent Mile, to see what it was.

Here’s a hint; There’s a bunch of shops.

At the end of it, however, there’s a beach, which I wasn’t expecting.
Or particularly dressed for.
You can’t see it in these pictures, because I was mostly going for “what a nice day”, but trust me, there was sand, people swimming, people pushing each other off the edge you can see there, a beach bar, …

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This building?

I photographed this because of memories of all of the McGraw-Hill titles various co-workers & I shifted, ordered, sourced, and occasionally sold, while working at bookstores.

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Looks like this is the only photo I took of the Freehand Hostel, and I think I was trying to photograph the retro ice-cream truck on the other side of the intersection.
Anyway, it’s the dark brick building with the circles & quasi smiley faces on it.

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Here’s the lock between the Chicago River & Lake Michigan.
There was constant upflow from somewhere inside that area with markers around it, which I’m guessing will have to do with the operation of the lock.

While I was down in the area (waiting for my boat trip, and also sorting out the Kalamazoo trip, by which I mean “going with the much better ideas of friends”) I found a map of Chicago.
The Freehand is in there, on Ohio Street.

And here’s Navy Pier.
And the water plant next door.

 

There was also … whatever this is.

 

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This last image requires some context, so, … Here’s a link to a news article from Sweden.

Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens

My response to said article may well be my most “Approved Of By Total Strangers” comment on social media to date.

Back in 2012 I did an Architectural Cruise, so this time I did the River & Lake version.

It included some of the same content for the river portion, on the grounds that it’s right there, and there is nothing else to talk about.

Yes, I did try to take a US Flag Selfie.
And what of it?

 

The riverside walk has trees, and benches, and many many places who’d like to sell you things.
It’s really quite nice, particularly on blisteringly hot days when the humidity is making you feel like you’re breathing a mattress.

Something I noticed on the walk down to said riverside walk past the multi-level roads was what I can only describe as a Homeless Encampment, off the side of the pedestrian ramp & running alongside Lower Wacker Dr, more or less sheltered from the rain & sun. Not too bad a spot, from the look of it.
In Summer.
According to the evening doorman at the hostel, or more accurately at the cocktail bar in the ground floor of the hostel, utterly miserable, bordering on lethal, in winter.

I’d also like to point out that the “RUMP” on the Trump tower wasn’t intentional.
That said, having noticed the line-up, there was no way I was going to move to avoid taking the shot.

The Chicago River once flowed into Lake Michigan, and along with it, all of the quite literal shit they dumped into the river.
So they reversed the flow of the river, and all of their crap goes the other way now.
There are locks on the entrance to the lake – My first time travelling through a set of locks, so I took many photos, most of which are identical, and some utterly underwhelming video.

 

Behold!
Water!!

 

Navy Pier, as seen from a different angle!

I’m assuming that all the US flags are there in cases of lost Canadian boaters, so that they know they’ve gone way too far South.
Part of a reciprocal arrangement, as seen with the recent Port Huron Float Down Incident.

 

I’m pretty happy with this picture.
If it wasn’t for whatever that building with the crane is, it’d have even more of a Gates of Argonath vibe.

 

 

Somewhat like Edinburgh, Chicago, or it’s tour guides, like to bring up the horrible bits of the cities history, or at least the unsavory bits.
Things like “Al Capone used to drink at the penthouse speakeasy up there”.
Or “The Great Chicago Fire crossed the river because there was so much shit in it that the surface burned”.

After the fire burned out, they found that the only things left were the facilities to get things into & out of the city.
This worked out pretty well, since architects & companies started to come to Chicago to build new buildings & headquarters and the like on their brand-new & slightly smoking clean slate.