Sigh. Alarm set for eight, awake at 6:30. This means I was awake a few minutes later when it started to thunder.

Ah, well. It was raining pretty well when James took Willow outside, but it had stopped by the time we had finished breakfast and had loaded up the luggage cart (Willow jumped upon it before we had it full; we weren't going to leave her behind!). I stopped at the desk to tell them that the sink was not emptying properly and also that we had not been able to get hot water out of it. So they credited my card with one night's stay! That was nice of them.

We got gasoline at the station catty-corner from the hotel and were off; Schuyler wrapped against the chill: it was 50°F out and heavily overcast. We drove through a band of rain, and then it slowly began to clear, lower clouds to higher, lighter grey clouds, to fluffy clouds, to cloudless and fluffy clouds again. It was always breezy, and by the time we reached Michigan it was snapping the flags out.

Ohio was farm fields from Dayton until we approached the outskirts of Toledo, broken by groves of trees sometimes filled, sometimes dotted, with chrome-yellow brilliant trees mixed in with bits of orange. We crossed the Lincoln Highway (U.S. 30; see our adventures on the Lincoln in November 2009), emblazoned with the Lincoln logo, and also I-80, which I was last on in 1978. We stopped at a rest area in Ohio next to a windswept farm whose fields lay bare in the sharp breeze (some miles down the road we had passed a farm that was going to be sold at auction; very sad). We picked up some Wendyburgers before we left Ohio and ate in the car at the Michigan welcome center, where the breeze off Lake Erie made it too chilly to eat at the picnic table.

Then we drove through Detroit, past the Ambassador Bridge, and up a long, long freeway to our hotel in Troy. I remember way back when when all you needed to visit Canada was a driver's license and they inspected your car. I would have liked to have gone...but we didn't have time to get passports.

This is an odd neighborhood: a mixture of hotels, a few restaurants, and many high-rise office buildings. Down the street there are some shopping centers and stores; we hung around for a while after moving into the room (this one a full one-bedroom suite, with a full living room rather than a sitting room), and then went out to the TGIFriday attached to the hotel. We did the "2 for $10" thing, with me getting an appetizer (potstickers) and chicken bruschetta, and James getting dynamite chicken and the dessert (peanut butter cup pie), and then we shared. Afterwards we stopped at Petsmart to get something for Willow, and then went to Barnes & Noble just to walk off dinner. Did buy two cross-stitch magazines.

Nothing much on television again...were watching House Hunters on HGTV until Castle started. Schuyler has been singing her little head off tonight. Almost couldn't hear the dialog over her voice! We have her on the desk in the living room rather than on the tray like she was at the other hotel, and she seems pleased by it.

Wow! They are saying the aurora is visible in some towns outside of Detroit! They even had photographs sent by viewers of the shimmering curtain.

Oh, we watched Castle on WXYZ, the television station that derived from the original Detroit radio station of the same call letters. This is where the radio series The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet were created. Almost as good as passing by KDKA. :-)

Labels: food, television, travel, vacation, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:06:00 PM

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