Michigan Road Trip

I'm on a roadtrip to Grand Rapids, Michigan to visit a dead president. I always see something interesting as I'm driving along on my highway jaunts, and since I usually travel alone I have no one to share my great insights with - but aha! I now have a blog!

This trip is a fairly short one distance-wise. Grand Rapids is just over three hours from Chicago (on a good day with limited traffic issues). I've only been in Michigan once before in my life, so this should be a fun one.

When newcomers visit Chicago for the first time they are often surprised at how little big industry - those that created Chicago - can be seen from downtown. That's because it's all to the south of town on the Illinois/Indiana border. This trip brought me right through the heart of it.

When I passed into Michigan I stopped for gas ($4.27/gal). At the gas station register I saw an interesting handwritten sign. First they say that the clerk will not make change. That's not too strange. But below that it reads: "The clerk is not interested in buying CD players, jumper cables, radios, watches..." and the list went on. The only reason a sign like this is created is because this is an issue for this gas station. Things that make you go, hmmm.

Then I read the rest of the sign: "We are sorry if you lost all your money gambling, but there is nothing we can do to help."

Ah, the gas station is across the street from a casino. At first I though about how sad it is that they have had the situation arise enough that they had to create a sign to address it. Then my cynical/mercenary/capitalist side emerged. Business idea: open pawn shops next door to casinos and take heartless advantage of people with gambling problems! I'm kind of amazed the gas station owner hadn't thought of it. I'm not enough of a cold entrepreneur to actually do this - but if someone should happen to read this blog, borrow the idea and make millions, I will expect a royalty of some sort.

Driving into Michigan the traffic with me was interesting. About every third other car had Illinois plates, and one in four had bicycles attached to the back. The deeper into the state I drove I eventually lost the bike carriers, and the further away from Lake Michigan I got as I got into the heart of Michigan the fewer and fewer Illinois plates I saw. My only conclusion is that 1) there was a bike rally somewhere near Detroit (my route caused me to split off from the main highway toward Detroit about 60 miles into the state); and 2) Chicagoans like to weekend during the summer on the opposite side of the lake from the city.

My main impression about driving in Michigan: the highways are terrible! For several miles it looked like a truck spilling acid drove along oblivious and the acid burned deep channels in the path behind it (the burned out channels were only in one lane, sometimes changed lanes, but were never in two lanes at the same time).