Detroit

Tuesday, August 11th. Trip through Ontario. We left Niagara Falls at about 11:30 am…and headed west across flat Ontario towards Detroit. We stopped for pizza halfway and had some great food at a pizza place owned by an Iraqi who had moved to Canada. Ride was uneventful until we hit a rainstorm about two hours from Windsor….rained so hard we had to pull to side of road. Canada looked like USA but the names of stores, etc., were different. Then it was onto to Windsor, where gambling (Caesar’s) is the biggest thing in town. Went thru the Windsor-Detroit tunnel. Drove north to Cranbrook, the Bloomfield Hills-based prep school where Dad taught in the early 1980s. Then it was down to Dearborn (where the Henry Ford museum is located), where we tried in vain to find a hotel that took dogs. We finally ended up at a Marriott town-house Residence Inn. We checked in but found the accommodations pretty scary – the rooms smelled like cooked food, were dirty and the crowd there was transient and not so great. Dad went to the front desk and they were nice enough to let us bail free of charge. It was now 8:30 pm, all of us were hot and hungry, and Mom and Dad were also dragging. We called downtown to the Westin Book-Cadillac Hotel, which had been renovated in 2008 at a cost of $200 million, and they had a big room for us. We then stopped at the local PF Chang’s, where me, Rob and Patrick liked the food and where we got a bonus at dessert….they had made an extra set of desserts and gave it to us free – that made everyone happy. We then got into the car and made it to the Motor City, unpacked, and had a great night’s sleep.