Cars & Guitars 2

The sun finally decided to come out so we loaded up the grand kids and heade for the “Henry Ford & Greenfield Village”. If you have never been there and are coing to be in the are you really should set aside at least one day but two would be much better to visit. If you have a large family or plan on going more then one day check out their special Annual Family Pass it could save you some money.


We spent the first 3 hours wandering around the village, touring the Ford farm, the Wright brothers house and bike shop, Edisin 's laboratory and a ton of other sites, as you walk around the streets you have to dodge the Model T's as they wizz by at 15 mph (there are about 30 of them that you can take a tour in), the horse drawn bus, the men racing their big wheel bikes, barbershop quartets, marching bands and much more. There is something of interest here for everyone, young and old. By mid afternoon it was getting a little hot so we headed for the air conditioned museum.

Rachel wanted to sit on the Rosa Parks bus since they just studied that in school and Nick wanted to see the Lincoln assassination chair from the Ford Theater. After this it was grandpa's turn and we ran over to the traveling exhibit ”Rock Star's Cars and Guitars 2”. It was just like stepping into the Jimmy James Time Machine and setting the destination dial to Rock & Roll, the King of Music. The kids managed to run through here in a record 30 seconds, but then they had to wait about 45 minutes until grandpa emerged from the exit and I could have spend a lot more time in there. I'm just going to throw in a few pictures up to give you a little hint of what it was like.

Z Z Tops 33 Ford Coupe. it had legs.


Alice Coopers Ride.




Jimmie Vaughns set of wheels.



Kid Rocks Lincoln.






Ricky Nelson's Coupe, the same one that he drove in the TV series.














B B King's
































And you always save the best for last Roy Orbison's

SE Michigan, city camping

The lack of a Blog entry for awhile can only mean one thing, we're back in SE Michigan for the summer messing around with the grand kids. We're camped about an hours drive north from the kids, this is one of the few parks that has a decent monthly rate and we're to far away for the emergency kid sitting phone call.
We've been running back and forth for the baseball games but they finally came to an end this week so we might get a few things done know.
This is a city campground that connects to the big city park which is also a wetland area, there are plenty of trails around the lake and to the other city parks (about 4 miles worth). The grand kids are getting a little big so we're bringing them up one at a time this summer and it is so much easier to handle in the confined space of a Class “C”.
There is a lot of wildlife in this area, thousands of geese, turtles and other type birds, they said that there is a Gray Fox in the area this year, that might explain the reduced rabbit population. On one walk last week we spotted about ten different turtles lying their eggs.
Here's a few pictures of the area.

Trail from the Campground.



Baby Geese in the park




Crossing the wetland.



They think we have food for them.




Part of the lake.




Bridge across the lagoon



Mr Black bird.



Mom lying the eggs




UPDATE: Today while sitting and looking out the window I saw the Gray Fox come right through the middle of the campground and into the woods, it was about 2:PM and I watched him for about 200 feet,

Fort Wayne

To start with we are camped at Johnny Appleseed Park in downtown Fort Wayne, this is a little park, about 25-30 water and electric sites w/honey wagon, in the corner of the park. It's a little hard to find but if you plan on doing anything in Fort Wayne this is the place to camp, you are within minutes of any place in the city.

Fort Wayne has a ton of things to do, one of the nations largest genealogy centers, Botanical gardens, Zoo, over 20 miles of paved bike trails that follow the St. Joseph, Maumee and St Marys Rivers, and every type restaurant you could thing of. If you get bored here it's your own fault.

There is a beautiful new minor league baseball park downtown where the Tin Caps play, we didn't get a chance to go to a game as they were on the road this entire week. The name Tin Caps comes from the fact that Johnny Appleseed used to wear is tin pot as a hat while he was wandering the country side, hence the Tin Caps, we did see a sign that said “ It's the Tin Caps not the Pot Heads”.

I dropped Cathy off at the genealogy center for the day then I drove about 15 miles north to Auburn to do the museums, there are about eight museums in this area. I parked the car and the Auburn-Dusenberg Museum was to my right and the National Automotive and Truck Museum was to my left, time for a decision, I went left the the automotive and truck museum, this seemed more like the kind of place an old street racer would like.





But my favorite section was the muscle cars from the late 60's and early 70's, a 429 Ford Torino, 426 hemi Dodge Charger, 440 dual quads Plymouth GTX, 440 six pack Dodge Cuda, 396 Chevy Z-28.

I swear, I closed my eyes and it was a hot humid August night in 1969 and we were cruising Woodward Ave, looking for something that would give our midnight green 440 Charger (just like the one the bad guys drove in the movie Bullet) a challenge. We spot a 396 Chevelle at the light, pull up next to him, both drivers give a little nod, the light turns green and it's nothing but screaming engines roaring exhaust and smoking tires for the next ten seconds. Our ten inch slicks gave us a big jump off the line and he never stood a chance after that, a couple of quick turns through the side streets just in case any cops were around (which I ended up being one for 25 years in Detroit) and then to the nearest Drive-in so the loser could buy Cokes.

I'm sorry, was that out loud?

Mean while back at the museum, I enjoyed it a lot more then I thought that I would, I then got in my 4 cylinder PT Cruiser and all the way home I was looking for a Corvair to race.

Cathy decided to take a break from research today so we thought that we would take a look at the zoo, and a look is all we did, there were at least 20 school buses there so it was time for plan B. Plan B is drive back to Auburn and go through the World War II Victory Museum, Half of the building is the Victory Museum. This part of the museum is so large and covers so much information that you just have to come here yourself and wander around for a couple of hours so I'm just going to post some pictures and try to explain it that way.

Show us your WAR FACE!






This is a 25 foot long model of a ship that was used in the "Winds of War" series.





General Patton


The red Ball Express, they even made a move about them.










Click on this picture to read all the fine print, it's pretty interesting.










These are the war plans that would have been used in case the Atom bomb didn't work

When you exit this area you come into the Baseball section which has a few displays about the different ball players from this area and about the Womens Baseball League, from some reason they had a lot of Tiger stuff.

In the center there is a room about the history of the television, there were a bunch of old TV's and displays from the old time television shows, one of the displays was about the Lone Ranger and his faithful companion Tonto.

OK, I'm going to regress a little here back to about 1957 or so.

Growing up in Detroit, which is the home town of the Lone Ranger TV show, he was pretty much every kids hero. The kid two doors down from me was having a birthday party and we were all down the basement celebrating, they had just got us seated for the ice cream and cake, when we heard a familiar voice yell “Whoaaaa Silver, stay right there”. Our eyes were the size of silver dollars as we all watched the Lone Ranger and Tonto came down the stairs, they stayed for about a half hour, had ice cream and cake with us and then were on their way, the screen door slammed and all we heard was “HI-HO Silver Away”. Of course they made sure that we all stayed in the basement so we wouldn't see them get into the car and drive off down the street. The kid whose birthday it was, was the son of the producer of the Lone Ranger Show and that's how he happened to show up. Fifty plus years later and every time I see some thing about the Lone Ranger that's the first thought in my mind.

Now let's pop back outside of my mind, because Cathy sez that, that's a scary place to be and get back to the museum.

Across the lobby is the Kruse Automotive & Carriage Museum, from what I gathered Kruse makes a lot of the cars for Hollywood, he also does custom cars for auto shows and collects notable Carriages.

With the carriages they have pictures of what they looked like when he found them along with the display, and it is unbelievable the work they did to make them look probably better then they did new. They had President Grant's carriage , one from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, but our favorite was the Coronation coach for King Ernest Augustus of Hanover, son of King George III of England.





The next set of displays were of the custom cars that he has made, then the Hollywood stuff which everyone will recognize and then a lot of race cars that he built or sponsored. What we thought was going to be about an hour turned into four hours.




Some of his custom work.








Indy cars

Dragsters







Driving around on a few of the back roads and side streets of Fort Wayne we came across this neighbor park , which was huge, it had a nice size lake with a fountain, a big rose garden (we're about a week early for the blooms) and a reflecting pool, this is really a great area to visit.

Drive down a little side street that's blocked by a school bus and see all the kids coming out of a little park between two house's and you just have to park the car and see for yourself, see what, well I guess we'll find out.

The burial site of Meshekinnoquah, or as his friends called him Chief Little Turtle, he rose to be the Chief of the Miami Nation. He led the Indians in the defeat of Colonel LaBalme in 1780, then defeated General Harmar at the Battle of Kekionga in 1790. In 1791 at Fort Recovery, Ohio he defeated General St. Clair in America's worst defeat by Indians with over 1000 killed. He was stopped with the entire Indian Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, he was a signer of the Treaty of Greenville, met with three US Presidents; Washington, Adams and Jefferson and when he died in 1821 he was laid to rest in the Miami burial grounds with full U.S. Military honors.

Since we're doing genealogy and graves when we got back to camp we took a short walk through the woods to visit another grave, Johnny Appleseed, he's buried on a knoll in the middle of the park.




It's Memorial Day weekend so all the weekend campers are out and have the park filled with smoke from their campfires (we call them smokes because they never seem to get any flames going, just smoke) so we're on lock down in the motor home with the windows close and the air on so we can breath while we watch our FIRST PLACE TIGERS play ball. I know that I'm forgetting a lot of things since there is so much here, but this is getting a little long and I have to make a pizza for lunch and then maybe another for dinner, after all it is a holiday.