He Says: Heading (Mid) West
After saying goodbye to all of our Ottawa friends, we headed to the Canadian city of Windsor, which sits right on the U.S. Border with Detroit, Michigan.
Another first for us kiwis who live on a bunch of islands – crossing into another country via tunnel! The Windsor-Detroit border is the busiest border crossing in North America, with approx $200 billion worth of trade crossing each year (that’s triple to total trade in and out of New Zealand, over a single bridge and tunnel)
We had the morning to spend walking around Detroit – nowhere near enough time to see what the historic city had to offer, but we did our best! Highlights from our brief sojourn include the Spirit of Detroit Sculpture, the GM Renaissance Center, and the Guardian Building all within an hours’ walk from the border crossing.
Spirit of Detroit Sculpture
Guardian Building
General Motors Renaissance Center
After finishing up in Detroit, we carried on west to our next destination, Grand Rapids. A few people recommended Grand Rapids to me as a nice town to stay in, and we weren’t disappointed. Even better when we found out our AirBnB was on a street full of heritage homes, many beautifully restored to their original condition.
Our AirBNB in Grand rapids (left) and a selection of ther heritage homes up and down the same street.
Just 10 minutes walk from our AirBnB was the Meyer May house – an early design by perhaps the most famous architect in the world (his words, and mine), Frank Lloyd Wright. Ever since I did a study on him in primary school because we shared a birthday I have been fascinated by Wright houses…multiple hours down Wikipedia rabbitholes. His most famous design, Fallingwater, might be familiar.
The house was commissioned by Meyer May, a clothing store owner from Grand Rapids. Meyer May was 5’5” tall, and the entire house was designed around those proportions. From our towering 6 foot perspective, the house felt a little awkward and short, but once you crouched a little it all became clear. By matching the proportions of the house to its owner, someone looking in could see the silhouette of a man who took up a whole window, rather than only three-quarters. All of the light fixtures, doors, and ceilings were designed to make a short man feel tall. Amazing.
The outside of the house is as distinctive as the inside – Frank Lloyd Wright loved to emphasize the horizontal aspect of a house - one example of the lengths he went to do this was using a different shade of mortar for the top and bottom of bricks to the sides, all to draw the eyes to long horizontal lines . He referred to standard house designs as simply “a box full of smaller boxes”, while he was pioneering open plan designs well before they became popular.
You can see the effect of using different shades of mortar non the bricks by the windows.
We spent two hours touring the house and watching a great film which documented the restoration of the house in the 1980s. 70 years after being built, the house was in terrible shape before a Grand Rapids office furniture company bought it and restored it back to its original condition. I’ve linked the video below (don’t let the weird music and haircuts deter you) as it is well worth a watch to see the excruciating detail that went into the restoration, including:
Scraping away 10+ layers of paint to uncover the original paint colour from inside
Custom casting of light fixtures (including matching the patina to the original fixtures still inside)
Recreating furniture from scratch based on drawings found in archives
Commissioning a custom run of fabric to match exact yellow of the original dining suite covers
While I took off to play golf for the afternoon, Amanda visited the Gerald Ford presidential museum. The only thing I knew about President Ford was that he took over after Nixon’s Watergate Scandal. These presidential museums seem to follow the same format, that every man has had the perfect life experiences to set him up to lead with integrity, passion… etc etc. I wonder if the Nixon presidential museum tells a similar story!
After a lovely couple of days in Grand Rapids, we headed south to Chicago, and then to Green Lake, Wisconsin. Click those links to go to the separate write-ups about those trips as there was too much to squeeze in here!
Our last stop in the American Midwest was Minneapolis. The only reason we stopped here was to break up the 12 hour drive from Green Lake to Winnipeg, and we were both blown away by the beauty of the city.
Minneapolis is very close to Saint Paul; together the area is known as the Twin Cities… even sharing a baseball team called the Twins.
The Minnehaha Falls - 10 minutes drive from downtown Minneapolis…great spot for a picnic!
Remnants of the old flour mills that are an important part of Minneapolis history
Looking back over stone bridge to the other side of the Mississippi (and more flour mills)
We packed up our gear once again and said goodbye to perhaps the nicest AirBnB hosts we’ve had so far before making the long trek up through Minnesota and North Dakota back into Canada. All in all we visited 19 out of 50 states during our two years here…not bad, but room for improvement :)
A sample of the license plates we came across - we saw all 50 over the last two years, even Alaska and Hawaii!
