Mini-vacation report

Our mini-vacation, which ended Sunday night, was four days long. But when you remember that two of them were largely spent driving from here to there and back again, that leaves just two days of actual vacation.

How were those two days? They could have been better, but they could easily have been far worse. I'm satisfied.

We left Thursday morning and arrived at my son's place at about 8:30 p.m. (We won't get into the time changes--even though Detroit is in Eastern Time, I'm using Central Time throughout. If I try switching Central to Eastern and vice versa, I'll only get myself bollixed up. In not too many more weeks, of course, I'll be driving from Central to Eastern fairly regularly, as football season gets going--only Michigan's four counties that border Wisconsin are on Central Time, and mine is one of them.)

Essentially, we dropped my younger son off at my older son's place. He enjoys visiting his big brother, and big brother, I think, enjoys showing off all his stuff to a properly appreciative audience. Here, they are playing his new Wii ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Gamers-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

And what cutting-edge game were they playing?
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Mario-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

We also watched the "Family Guy" version of Star Wars before heading off to our motel.

We found a fairly nice motel, especially for the price. Let's just say that three nights at $45 sure is a lot easier on my wallet than three nights at $90 or so. Two double beds, a refrigerator in the room, (fairly) high speed internet, close to the exit door. I pay all the bills for this trip, so ...

My wife had dozed off at my son's apartment, but she was wide awake at the motel, reading a book she had gotten. As for me, my lower back was aching, as it usually does after a long drive. It took her until midnight to settle down and get to sleep. I checked some websites before shutting down for the night.

In the days leading up to our trip, my wife had studied some museums and other sights we could visit in the Detroit area. We both like to check out museums, and we found some good ones. A historical museum. A city museum. And the Detroit Institute of Art. All of them are downtown, within walking distance of each other. I especially wanted to visit the Art Institute. I very rarely get a chance to see an art museum, and I badly wanted to take advantage of this chance to see one. I think my wife wanted to see it, too.

The trouble is, the younger generation simply has other priorities. If I may grossly generalize, they think of classic artwork as "old paintings" that may hold their attention briefly, but not much longer. Bottom line: They showed little interest in going to downtown Detroit to see the museums.

On the other hand, another museum my wife found drew their rapt attention. It is called Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, and it features mechanical devices and coin-operated things from over a century. It's located in Farmington Hills, in the northwest part of the Detroit metro area. Find out more about it at [URL="http://www.marvin3m.com"]their website[/URL].

I have to admit it--it really was quite a fun place to visit (and my son said that in his roughly 10 years of living in the Detroit area, he had never been there before!). It didn't have a lot of old pinball machines but other kinds of coin-operated devices. Fortune-telling machines. Mechanical bands. Vintage stuff, which always interests me. Here are some photos ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Wideview-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Marvins-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

They had all kinds of stuff everywhere, including old-time wall posters ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Posters-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

... and clocks honoring various pop culture figures from the past. Lots of stuff wherever you looked ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Lookup-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

They had mechanized and computerized music machines (next to a vintage player piano) ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Autoband-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

... and a pint-sized carousel ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Carousel-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

... and funhouse mirrors ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Mirror-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

... and a scene of some lucky guy getting a nice backrub ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Backrub-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

Here is something from over a century ago. This is my wife trying out a Mutoscope--it showed short flip-card "movies." You put in a dime (the current price) and start cranking the handle. You see a short comedy story--in this case, a man who had a woman as his "typewriter"; his wife comes in, objects, and soon a male takes over as the "typewriter." This is what they watched for kicks in the 1900s ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Mutoscope-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

No, I did not take on Kill-R-Watt. If you see those two metal posts in the front, you will get a pretty good idea of how it works ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-KillRWatt-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

That took up a lot of Friday afternoon. We had supper at a Red Robin restaurant and then wound up back at the apartment. Part of my master plan was to go to the Detroit Tigers' game against the White Sox downtown on Friday night. But we couldn't get comps, and maybe that's just as well. The game went long, the Tigers led until the 9th inning when their closer gave up a two-run home run with two out--one out away from the win. Grrrr.

Also, if we had gone to the game and stayed there until the bitter end, we wouldn't have gotten back to the motel until close to midnight. Instead, we watched the game for a while in the apartment, watched a DVD or two and made plans for Saturday. That's my son's big day--the day of the show.

If I didn't explain that before, he is into improvisational comedy and has been taking classes at a Detroit area Second City group for the last few years. There's a lot of preparation that goes into being spontaneously funny. The way he explained it to me later is that you have to take on a different persona and act the way that person would react to different situations that arise. They had to be on their toes, too, because often they are reacting to situations and locations suggested by the audience ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Det08-Stage-7-08.jpg[/IMG]

I got a few (still) pictures of different classes on stage, but I didn't get any of my son: He had borrowed a video camera and wanted me to record their show. It was the first time I had ever operated a video camera; I think I did fairly well, considering I didn't know about the show in advance and had no way to prepare. Bottom line: The cameraman was doing an improv, too.

My wife found a video mode on her little camera, and she got a movie. Maybe we can transfer it to my laptop and show it to my mom. If I can figure out a way to do that.

The show went on for most of the afternoon. Afterwards, we went to a pizza restaurant for a victory party and then back to the apartment. I think we also visited a Best Buy, though I didn't get anything. We also visited several big bookstores, Borders and Barnes & Noble. I was looking for a new book, "Opening Up," about open relationships, but none of the three huge bookstores I visited had it. I settled for "The Complete Persepolis," the comic book memoir of a woman who grew up in revolutionary Iran. I later saw that the story is now out in a DVD. Well, I'll read the book first.

Of course we wound up back at the apartment, watched a little of the Tigers-White Sox game, but my wife and I were both getting tired, and we wanted to get an early start for the trip home the next morning. So, back to the motel and early to bed. Before 10, believe it or not. Of course, we didn't go immediately to bed. We had spent several hours together in the back seat of his Prius that afternoon, enough time to goof around with each other when nobody was looking. So we were looking forward to getting to bed.

We were both ready to go Sunday morning. We picked up David and left for home at about 9:30--and got home about 11 hours later. That is one bloody long drive! But the kitties were happy to see us. They both had food and water when we got back home. (The woman I asked to feed them had been around.) Still, we have been petting and loving up the kitties on and off ever since.

****
Monday, it was back to work. I wrote most of this up Monday night, but Charlie's feline Jedi mind tricks prevented me from working up the pictures until now.

I also wrote S on Tuesday. There's a chance I can visit S and her husband during his vacation next week. Meanwhile, my son wants me to take him to the Wisconsin Valley Fair this weekend near Wausau. That's about 120 miles away.

My wife may be quite interested in that. The grandstand show on Saturday night features Herman's Hermits, including Peter Noone as the lead singer. Way back when, when she was in high school, Herman's Hermits was/were her favorite band. A few years after we got married and were living in Milwaukee during the '70s, I took her to see the Hermits (without Noone) at a local club.

Now, 30 years later, the current-day Hermits, including Noone, will be performing before the Wisconsin Valley Fair crowd.