Tuesday, August 9th

We took the day off from sailing to visit the Henry Ford Museum, a 16 mile bike ride away.  The bike ride was not very pleasant – it took us through some of Detroit’s industrial areas.  The museum, however,  was very interesting, not just cars, but clocks, aeroplanes, locomotives as well.  Henry Ford actually dabbled in designing and building a ‘peoples’ aeroplane, like a Model T aeroplane, but the project was not successful and he concentrated on cars.  (Notice that I resisted the temptation to say the project never took off!)
We also visited the Greenfield Village on the same site.  It has many interesting features – buildings and homes that Ford bought, disassembled and rebuilt here.  For example Wilbur and Orville Wrights home and bicycle shop where they built bikes to fund their aeroplane development passion.   We also took a ride around the village on a genuine, coal burning, steam locomotive and were shocked at the pollution this thing produces.  It certainly gave a feeling of how dirty and smelly rail travel was in those days.  We had lunch in a tavern serving authentic 18^th century food.  The Dandelion Soup was delicious!

The skies opened at about 4:30 so we took cover for about half an hour and contemplated just how wet we were going to get on the ride home.  However the rain stopped and we had a nice dry ride back.  Packed the bikes and visited the yacht club where a local Jazz Band was playing.  They were very good.    It was interesting being in a yacht club where the population was 90% African American.