Michigan!

I think one of the reasons Joe likes Chris so much is because Chris will play all out. Joe seems to be on the losing side of this shaving cream wresting match.






I am not sure how Megan and Joe got into a tennis wrestling match but it looks like Megan is winning this one. Joe claims they posed for this but I don't know.

Megan and Chris have been living in a house in the Michigan country-side. One feature of the house is a wheel chair lift which Joe decided was a pretty cool theme park ride. I had to put a stop to it because he couldn't just go up and down the steps he had to go up 7 inches, then down 12 inches, then up 18 inches, then down 4 inches. It was getting annoying and I was afraid he was going to break it. He wasn't too upset about losing his Disneyland Pass because we went to the Ford museum and village in Dearborn.

This is the bus on which Rosa Parks made her famous stand by not giving up her seat.

Just inside the door of a railcar diner was this cigarette machine. I remember all of the cigarette machines around when I was a kid. It is no wonder that almost all of the kids in my sixth grade class were already smoking. Joe will be in sixth grade in the fall and I can't imagine anyone his age buying smokes. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth there would be a sign on the machine saying that no one under 18 was allowed to buy the cigarettes, but a machine can not check for ID so you can guess how effective the control was.

This is the car that JFK was riding in when he was shot. You know, I never wondered what happened to that car.

This is the chair that Lincoln was sitting in when he was assasinated. Yes, there is still a blood stain on the chair. Isn't this collection kind of odd? You have to wonder what the curators were thinking.

This was a sign outside a southern plantation home on the museum grounds. I wasn't there but I bet the plantation owner and his kids were working just as long of hours during the harvest. That is the thing about farm work. It is always hard and the harvest has to be done in a timely fashion or the whole crop will be wasted and that might mean starvation for everyone. My dad has a catttle ranch, and even the hay harvest is extemely time sensitve. He works from sun up and into dusk so that he can get his hay in before it gets rained on and he has to sell off his livestock because he has nothing to feed them in the winter. What I am saying is that perhaps the evil slave owners were not so evil, but concerned for the viability of the farm.


When I walked up to this house I almost felt like I had walked into my Grandpa and Grandma Stockam's living room. Then the guide told us that this was the typical home of an African American family in the south during the depression. I had to let her know that a lot of white people were living in similar circumstances. I was starting to get a little peaved that caucasions were being portrayed as the rich over bearing class and that they spent their lives oppressing African Americans.

We found an old fashioned one room school house on the grounds and Joe and I went into our natural roles.

We found a hat shop and somehow Megan talked Joe into posing.

We ate lunch at a cafeteria that tried to serve some authentic old timey recipes. This is a hollowed out bread bowl filled with roast beef, topped with mashed potatoes and then covered with brown gravy. It was pretty good until we got down to the soggy bread. I think a sour dough bread bowl would solve this problem, but I wonder if Lincoln would ever eat anything like that.

This is a letter written by Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde. He is praising Ford cars for their get-away ability.

My kids have always been good at walking on stilts so we were able to show off our ability with the old fashioned games and toys in the park of the village.

The Ford Museum and Village had so many displays. If you ever find yourself near Detroit I would reccommend checking it out.