Detroit Downtown

Paul and Fiona. Thank-you, thank-you, for letting us stay. We had a great time. Loved the company and the 'lake district' and hope to visit again sometime.

For our readers, this was a stop just outside of Detroit in Michigan where Kevin could (finally) catch up with a school chum after about 11 years and for us to meet Fiona. The …

... the Diego Rivera "Detroit Industry" frescoes painted on the walls of the Rivera Court. More on that later. Catching the bus from downtown Detroit to the DIA was an experience in itself. There was a man sitting opposite me talking to someone in the ...

... three and a half hour drive takes you to the city of Detroit. There you'll find a Twilight Zone, scary city, without rival. Cruising downtown Detroit at 10:00 a.m. reminds you of the movie Vanilla Sky - the part where Tom Cruise jumps in his car to go to ...

... him as Tim the Tool Man doing pretty commercials. Anyway, thought of him. Pretty easy drive...I-55, I-80, I-94, I-96 to downtown Detroit. We don't often think of the Interstate Highway system in the US. But many of us remember when it was being ...

... amp; Baltimore (or is it Milwaukee?) just south of Grand Blvd and the former General Motors World Headquarters (now located downtown in the former Ford/Renaissance Center building). We drove over to the Woodbridge neighborhood west of the Wayne State ...

... Café and motor out to Oak Park to meet Peter Werbe at WRIF-FM. Werbe is one of a tiny handful of left-wing broadcasters in the United States and he's held down a talk show on local FM giant rocker WRIF for probably 30 years now. He's also the de facto ...

... a suite. Lovely day at Comerica Park, good game, and the Tigers completed a sweep of STL (poor Monte, the Cards fan). Downtown Detroit is slowly but surely looking better and better. Mostly visits and more visits and eating and more eating. I've eaten ...

... , I'm going to do it. So I just concentrate on myself." To that end, Sinclair splits his time between the United States and Europe, where he travels around, performing his poetry with a procession of regional bands dubbed the Blues Scholars ...

... . Then it was a swift trip on I-75 60 miles north to my home town of Flint and my gig with Glowb at Churchill's Pub downtown, right across Saginaw Street and the Flint River from where I used to hear and see all the traveling R&B revues at the IMA ...

... while back apparently, because no one was going there to visit. Jodi lives in a town called Taylor, about 25 minutes from downtown Detroit. It is an unexciting suburban maze with rows of single-storey brick houses, and pick-up trucks and SUVs lining ...

... get to the city boundary of Detroit, its "dirty time". Grey, crappy roads, rundown buildings, people on the street, hustlers and downtown has a few high rise buildings that give the appearance of a clean town but it's just a matter of a few blocks ...