Downtown drive-bys: the answers

Spoiler alert!

Thank you to Ms. Doll and Mr. Frog for playing...

Here are the long-awaited (?!) results of the quiz:

#1 Minneapolis, MN
#2 St. Paul, MN
#3 Chicago, IL
#4 Cleveland, OH
#5 Buffalo, NY

particularly interesting

Too interesting for me to resist...via my cousin:

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever occurs beyond its four walls. (TV rooms are called ‘family rooms’ in builder’s lingo. A friend who is an architect explained to me: “People don’t want to admit that what the family does together is watch TV.”) At the same time, the television is the family’s chief connection with the outside world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way: rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

James Howard Kunstler (via warmgun)

Downtown drive-bys: a photo quiz!

Here are some quick shots we took of different downtowns we passed by or through during our trip. All of these photos were taken through, or hanging outside of, the window of a motorized vehicle (in most cases, my car). How many can you recognize?
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
Answers revealed in a future post!

What a GREAT trip!

Thanks to a teachers' conference in Minneapolis that paid for our gas money, Bo and I took a good ol' road trip (one could even say a belated honeymoon...). To make a long story short (and to leave room for future posts on the subject), we drove from Montréal to Minneapolis and back, stopping many times along the way over the course of 15 days. We headed west through Ontario, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin into Minnesota and then returned by way of the more southern route through Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Northern Indiana, Northern Ohio, a little corner of Pennsylvania and all the way across New York State before returning to Montreal, creating a big loop. One of the exciting perks of this loop was hitting all five of the Great Lakes. Here's a look at what we saw...

Above: Lake Huron as seen from Thessalon, ON. We stopped and ate a picnic lunch here on day 2. It also happens to be the site of a customs and border patrol office. Kind of funny that we ate lunch at a border crossing given our situation...we later crossed the border at Sault Ste. Marie and for a change got to see the inside of a different customs office than our usual one on Rte. 15 (87).

Above: Lake Superior as seen from a roadside vista just outside of Marquette, MI also on day 2. We're actually look at a large bay and you can see the clouds coming in. It was a good thing we got this picture when we did, the clouds rolled in and the temperature went down into the 40's.

Above: Lake Michigan as seen from the marina in downtown Chicago on day 8. If you looked behind me as I took this picture you would have seen black clouds among the well-known skyscrapers preparing to unleash a downpour on tourists like Bo and I. We got soaked, but it was worth it, and even fun.

Above: That's right, Lake Erie. On day 10, we visited the Erie Basin Marina near downtown Buffalo with one of my dear friends (who I've known since college and don't get to see often enough) and her children. We enjoyed a picnic, climbed 83 steps to an observation tower and enjoyed hunting for treasures on a little beach.


Above: Last but not least, this sunset was captured on the shore of Lake Ontario near Pulaski, NY. This last in the series was during the last light of day 12 before we took a sharp right and drove among the many lesser, but still great, lakes of the Northern Adirondacks.

I was, we were, as you can imagine, really excited to get to see all the Great Lakes during this one trip. Add the fact that we visited many of the major cities on these lakes and several major rivers, and you can call this a river-and-lake economy immersion trip. Bo was totally in his element. Being that I was on vacation, visiting with faraway friends and showing all my old hangouts to Bo (not to mention swimming in as many hotel pools as I could), I guess I was in my element too.