On Sunday Sarah and I rode to Greektown in Downtown Detroit through the US Steel Plant at Zug Island. It’s a fun ride with some unusual and interesting landscapes:
First, it’s through the Ford Test Track facility at The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village: 
So Tom, how often does Sarah tell you to “put the damn camera away!”. Seriously dude you must have several thousand shots of her by now. Not that thats a bad thing.
Cool. Thanks for sharing Tom. Alway interesting to see what other peoples rides look like.
Yeah, I figured she gets her picture taken about 100 times a week on a slow week, and over 1500 times if I’m doing some kind of a photo shoot. Luckily, she likes having her picture taken and even went to school for it.
Now thats a nice shot. She look great in that one. I would love to do that steel mill ride sometime.
Sometimes when we go through the steel mill they are burning off gas from the smoke staxks and it is spectacular. There is almost always something interesting going on back there. It is rare when we go through there and don;t stop to watch something. Last year we saw them pouring molten steel once. It was incredible- like an artificial sunrise.
For an industrial area, the roads look really clean and free of debris.
There are a few reasons we ride back there, the pavement is one of them. There is a section going out of the industrial area into Detroit along Fort Street where you have to contend with some very bad pavement. If you pick your through it is short and there are no problems. In the Downtown area, nearest Greektown, the pavement is quite poor- but it is only about eight city blocks long.
We used to ride Hines Drive here- over and over and over. I’ve ridden thousands of miles on it. It is a great ride but it has just gotten stale after 20 years of riding there day after day. Mario is the guy who got us excited about heading south and east to ride from Dearborn. He was a bit of a pioneer of new routes.
Now I would say 80% of our rides head in this direction. There is always something to see and if you pick the right time it is nearly abandoned.
Her seat is too low.
; )
Here’s a link to detailed info on the ship we saw. It turns out it has quite an interesting lineage:
The pictures of the tug race look cool… but this tug (over)loaded with retired roly-poly midwesterners on tupperware plastic chairs looks a little scary to me 
Malaysian ferry disaster in the making…
but this tug (over)loaded with retired roly-poly midwesterners
Based on the party atmosphere as well as the ensign the boat is flying, I believe those are roly-poly Canadians.
Why isn’t Sarah riding a Kuota?
What were the abandoned buildings used for…uh, before they were abandoned?
but this tug (over)loaded with retired roly-poly midwesterners
Based on the party atmosphere as well as the ensign the boat is flying, I believe those are roly-poly Canadians.
roly-poly midwesterners, roly-poly Canadians… same thing, right? 
I’m not sure what those abandoned buildings were. There has been an enormous re-shuffling of real estate and usage as the auto companies desperately try to scale back. Delphi Automotive, a vendor to the big 3 (GM primarily) declared bankruptcy on Saturday and that is just one more victim of the enormous economic downturn in our area. Real estate foreclosures in our area are up 60% over last year. a block from my house there are three houses on the corner: All three are for sale and have been on the market for longer than two months. When I bought my house I paid *$100,000 *less than two comparable house on my street that were sold 16 months earlier.
The economy in Detroit is under profound downward pressure with layoffs, plant closing, airline (Northwest) and automotive bankrupticies. That may be a significant contributing factor to all the abandoned buildings.
There is a renaissance of sorts though- some of the warehousing has become lofts and such, very nice. No one has any money to buy the so many of the projects stall. But there may be light at the end of the tunnell toward the end of this decade when the dependance on costly U.S. labor has been resolved and those jobs are shifted/re-trained into other sectors of the economy.
On guy who works for us part time was a UAW line worker making huge money on the assembly line. Cut-backs and farming out of labor to contractors threatened his job and decreased his overtime to the point wher he came here part time. The UAW (in part) got him to a robotics programming course somewhere in Mississippi or Missouri and now he works for Auto Alliance (Mazda/Ford) as a robotics machine programmer. He works a ton and makes more money and stays clean at work. The “heavy lifting” assembly jobs are going away as the U.S. guys seem to be making a gradual shift to more skilled trades.
What a cool ride. Looks a little nippy out. What was the ride temp?
It was 52 degrees out when we left. Sarah wore an UnderArmour coldgear base layer, Voler short sleeve jersey, Voler Thermal vest and knee warmers.
I had an Assos base layer, Voler Jersey, Pearl Izumi Zephyr wind vest and Pearl Izumi Therma-Fleece leg and arm warmers and Pearl Izumi full-finger gloves.
We both wore Castelli windstopper socks in our shoes. In the bottom photo Sarah was pulling off her thermal vest and stuffing it in her jersey packet before we picked it up on the return trip.
Just in case nobody mentions this: the Voler clothing that Hammer/E-caps sells is cheap in price and absolutely kickass in performance. Just my opinion
Yup. it is also one of the only sources for smaller sized women’s clothing.
