This past weekend we loaded up the kids and headed over to Greenfield Village (Henry Ford's more-boring version of Disneyland) to watch some Olde-Timey baseball. I thought it would be fun to sit around watching Olde-Timey baseball, but apparently the kids thought it would be more fun to travel around the village in Olde-Timey cars, horse-drawn wagons, and the steam engine train than watch a bunch of hefty gents sweating in heavy woolens. Luckily I was able to meet up with some friends at the Eagle Tavern who enjoyed jokes about union suits and waxed mustaches.

Greenfield Village fields two full Olde-Timey baseball squads, the Nationals and the La De Das. I don't know if they have actual tryouts, but presume the main barrier to participation is the cost of those custom-made nineteenth century uniforms. The players follow the "official" rules from the 1860s; they may have been pitching underhand, but they were catching the baseball without gloves. We wondered if they wore porcelain cups. I used my phone to google when were jock straps invented. It turns out if these guys were keeping it real, there was nothing between that grounder and their gonads other than a rubberized canvas modesty girdle.

I wondered if the Nationals ended up winning the game, would they pour that giant jug of unpasteurized milk over the head of their coach? Sadly, I never got to find out because the La De Das emerged as victors after overcoming a five point deficit in the late innings.

I was pretty excited to see that they rustled up a street urchin to sell programs:

The game had to stop every time the train steamed across the outfield. All the players waved their hats and shouted "Huzzah!" at the iron horse.

My friend and I decided that someday, if we were both in town and able to grow formidable mustaches, we were going to try out for the team.

* * * * *

The next day (father's day), during my son's nap, my daughter and I walked over to Comerica Park to see if we could get into the sold-out game in the middle of the fourth inning. This was something we used to do all the time when it was just the two of us, but we hadn't been to a game together in years. This time we walked hand-in-hand all the way to the ballpark. A scalper sold us a $50 ticket for $20 and we ended up so close to home plate we could feel the rush of air from Miguel Cabrera's mighty swing:

During the baseball game I was able to explain to her for the first time how the game actually works, how the pitcher tries to trick the batter and the little details that seem so nonsensical at first, like force outs and balls caught in foul territory. The day was hot and sweaty, and she giggled when I held a glass of lemonade filled with ice against her cheeks. 

By the eighth inning, we'd already stood up and cheered for the home runs that put the Tigers in the lead, and she'd run out of questions about wild pitches and stolen bases. I gave her my phone to play some games and she made it through the Tigers' victory in the ninth and was able to run the bases once the players cleared the field:

Lately, her best friend has been playing a lot of baseball and he's pretty great at hitting the ball for a four-year-old. Because of this, she gets jealous, and that makes her want to practice, which is something I never would have forced upon her. Funny how that works. We stopped at a thrift store on Monday and picked up a cheap plastic bat and a couple of kid-sized mitts, and we've practiced hitting every day since.

Who knows? Maybe someday she can stick her hair up into her hat, stuff her cheek with chaw, and step into the batter's box for the mighty La De Das.

I've been documenting some of our daily adventures here for a few months now, and the good folks behind the new Dodge Caravan recently contacted us about sponsoring a few of these posts by buying the ads you see around them (full disclosure: they did not provide any vehicles or compensate us for any costs involved). Check out the links to learn more about the new Dodge Caravan, big enough to carry an entire Olde-Timey baseball team on a barnstorming tour across the Midwest and enough technology inside to convince them it's something right out of a Jules Verne novel.

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Word is out that this year there is a bumper crop of strawberries here in Michigan, and there's nothing quite like a freshly-picked organic strawberry to make those gargantuan atrocities grown in California greenhouses and trucked across the heartland taste as disappointing as they truly are. The kids and I hit the highway the other day to spend the morning picking strawberries out in the countryside west of town.

The boy did his job and ate everything he picked (and only a little of what we picked), while the girl (who has proven pretty useless on u-pick outings in the past) filled up her 4-quart basket rather quickly. She's on a bit of a ethical kick lately and insisted it was wrong to eat strawberries without paying for them. I insisted that was the best part of laboring in the hot sun and paying for the privilege of doing what Mexican migrant workers do every day just to feed their families.


Like every wise agritourism business, the farm charged more for the strawberries we picked than we would have paid for them at the market. But they had a bunch of miniature horses, goats, and chickens to make it worth our while. 


This was her favorite strawberry that she picked, shaped like a perfect heart. 


Here are the five quarts of strawberries we picked that morning. 


And here are the five jars of strawberry jam we made when we got home. It was our first effort canning, and we enjoyed it so much that we're planning to make jam from every kind of berry that ripens this summer so that we can enjoy the fruit we pick on our pancakes next winter. (We didn't use all five quarts for the jam; we're saving some to make a second batch of jam with some rhubarb we'll pick up at the market this weekend).

I'm already investigating u-pick blackberry, raspberry, blueberry and other fruit farms for other day trips this summer.

I've been documenting some of our daily adventures here for a few months now, and the good folks behind the new Dodge Caravan recently contacted us about sponsoring some of posts by buying the ads you see around them (full disclosure: they did not provide any vehicles or compensate us for any costs involved). Check out the links to learn more about the new Dodge Caravan with its spacious interior (room for more berries!) and enough multimedia options to keep the kids from whining on trips to the country no matter how long or short (something I definitely feel like I could use sometimes).

 

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The Detroit-Windsor tunnel is "the only vehicular international subaqueous border crossing in the world." I think that translates to the only place on earth where you get to sit in your own car while breathing petroleum fumes in standstill traffic while millions of gallons of water pass over your head and after about an hour you emerge somewhere that you need to visit a bureau de change in order to buy a coffee. While stuck in the tunnel my daughter said, "When are we going to get to Canada, eh?" She claimed I'd once told her Canadians talked like that and suddenly I felt guilty for raising an incipient Anti-Canadite. "Sweetie, Canadians are a tolerant, multi-cultural people that promote progressive social welfare and ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity; not all of them listen to the Tragically Hip while riding Zambonis on pilgrimages to see the igloo where Sidney Crosby was born."

"What are you talking aboot, you hoser?" she shot back.

"Every time you make fun of the Canadian accent, Caillou's T-cell count goes down," I warned her.

All of this scintillating fake conversation aside, getting into Canada was a pretty boring, drawn-out affair. Even after we emerged from under the river, we were then herded into separate lines that moved so slow we were fairly certain every car in front of us contained someone trying to sneak nuclear secrets to Iran or smuggle a trunk full of bootleg Nickelback CDs up to Winnipeg:

This pretty much sums up how the kids felt waiting in the 92-degree heat:

Still, it was great to finally get out onto the streets of Windsor to start soaking up some of the cultural differences. For example, Windsor has a lot of bars downtown that cater specifically to 19-20 year old Americans who love getting wasted but can't legally drink in suburban Detroit bars (meaning they have Jägermeister on tap and serve alcoholic slurpies in 3-foot plastic cups). I think it's great that Canada respects young people enough to make their own decisions about alcohol consumption, but in my opinion some of these Windsor establishments take the whole concept a bit too far:

I'd like to imagine it's a mashup of Cheers and those talking baby E-Trade commercials inside.

After driving across the west side of town, we quickly found the nature preserve we'd crossed an international border to visit (the Ojibway Nature Preserve). I've been hearing my whole life about the great Canadian wilderness, and here we were:

We didn't see any Caribou, but right after we started hiking, my wife was attacked in the face by this giant Canadian monster bug:

Here she is still clutching her heart at the shock of it:

It was a great place to take the kids for a hike.

I'm really enjoying hiking with the kids more often now that they're older and independently mobile. Gram, in particular, seems to really love it:

After we were done hiking, we headed back into town and drove right past the massive Windsor Assembly Plant, where Chryslers have been built since 1928 and minivans have been assembled since 1983. I knew I was going to write about our car trip to Canada for one of these posts sponsored by Dodge Caravan, but it never occurred to me that we'd be traveling past where the vehicles are actually built. The factory is Windsor's largest employer (4,450 employees make nearly 1500 vans a day). Seeing it was an important reminder of how connected my community is to this one across the river, where cars have been built for decades by skilled union laborers and how that still means something.

[photo by flickr user chrycopaul1066]

We headed towards Erie Street (Windsor's Little Italy) and when we got there we couldn't have received a better reception. A parade began just as we started walking around looking for a place to eat. I think it had to do with some saint or the church's history, and there were ten times as many people in the parade as there were people watching it. It was like stumbling onto a set for an ill-fated Francis Ford Coppola film with not enough extras and too much sunlight:

And a goat cart:

And an ox cart:

And some Canadian royalty:

"Technically the Queen of Canada lives in Buckingham Palace," I told the kids, "But I'll bet those girls are the Duchesses of Canadian Windsor or something. Or maybe Canadian beauty contest winners wear fake ermine capes rather than sashes?" They were escorted by gallant Colombian Knights in full regalia and really great mustaches:

After the parade, we ate a nice Italian meal, and most importantly, gave the kids their first taste of reasonably-authentic gelato:

She chose nutella flavor. My wife and I split a cup of lemon and for a moment we were reminded of our Italian honeymoon, back before we became saddled with all this responsibility to two sticky, grubby-faced urchins.  Before we headed back to Detroit, we stopped at the playground we'd seen so many times across the river where I'd intended to take the kid three years earlier before we were turned away at the border.

A day in Windsor, Ontario may not seem like your idea of a fun getaway, but for us it was a pretty great adventure. It's one of the cool parts of Detroit, having a foreign country so close. "Windsor's nice," I said to the wife as we headed back into the gaping maw of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

"The roads are so smooth," she said in agreement. "Imagine how nice Toronto must be: a Canadian city without the gravitational pull of Detroit dragging it down."

"I can't even imagine Edmonton," I admitted. "Let's come back here all the time." Just then brake lights flashed ahead, bringing us to a standstill well before we were halfway across the tunnel. Unfortunately my wife was driving, so my arm muscles were the ones that cramped holding up the phone to pacify both kids with an episode of Caillou I'd downloaded just in case we encountered such an emergency.

I've been documenting some of our daily adventures for the Something Fun Every Day section of Sweet Juniper, and the good folks behind the new Dodge Caravan recently contacted us about sponsoring some of these posts by buying the ads you see around them (they did not compensate us for any costs involved). It sure would have been useful to have some of the entertainment options these vehicles have while we were stuck in traffic; if we ever got one of those I'm pretty sure my media-deprived kids would insist we move out of our house and into the van.

 

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After sleuthing around on the web a bit to figure out which museums within 100 miles had mummies, we headed for the Ohio border and the lovely city of Toledo. On the drive down, the kid wanted to know how all these mummies came to America after they were buried in Egypt, and what followed was a question-filled discussion that stretched the limits of my knowledge of tomb robbers, Arab mysticism, the Crusades, and medieval medicine. I tried to explain that mummies weren't always treated like they are now in museums, that they were once stacked in leaky boats and ground up into medicinal powders or even displayed in rich peoples' living rooms. She seemed perfectly willing to accept a past where everything was more chaotic: where men snuck into silent tombs to rip jewels from linen-wrapped corpses, where those dessicated corpses were ground into a powder to cure some old woman's rheumatism in Marseilles, a world where mummies were sold on the black market and anyone with enough coin could have one so they ended up all over the world. Even in Toledo.

The Toledo Museum of Art (in addition to having free admission) has a truly exceptional collection (particularly if you're into glass art). The museum is totally worth a trip. The ancient collection was very impressive in its sky-lit neoclassical gallery:


Unfortunately, the Toledo museum's mummy was in storage during our visit, but the boy doesn't really know the difference between mummy cases, statues and actual bodies. He called all the coffins "mummies," walking around with his arms extended and mumbling, "Mmmmmmmm. . ." They were both pretty impressed with the 2,600-year-old coffin of Ta'mit ("She-Cat") because she had a green painted face. They looked all over for the head of poor Pharaoh Tanwetamani:


The girl gets excited seeing things in a new museum that remind her of what she's learned about at "our museum," from familiar hieroglyphics to the names of all the Egyptian gods and she loved spotting them in the artwork on display in Toledo (her favorites: Ma'at and Ammit, who she called "the Gobbler"). She has learned all about the funerary objects, and was quick to identify a slew of shawabti in one glass case. Shawabti are the tiny figurines of workers inscribed with a spell from the Book of the Dead that were buried with dead nobles, and the kids love them because they look like little toys; we tell stories of how they come to life like Lilliputians to make mischief all night. She says she would like to have some shawabtis to clean her room for her. I considered casting a spell from the Book of the Dead on all the Egyptian toy figures I've bought her.

At the museum store we bought a copy of David Macaulay's Pyramid and the whole drive back to Detroit I heard her interpreting the illustrations of pyramid construction for her brother.

* * * * *

The next mummy we visited was at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in nearby Ann Arbor. The museum's collection used to be displayed in the rambling rooms of an old stone mansion on State Street and I wasted a lot of time there during law school. Today the museum's collection is spread throughout a beautiful addition, and the Egyptian collection shines. Here another impressive green-faced coffin sits open, with two images of the goddesess Nut and Amentet inside. This coffin even has its own Facebook page.


But the real treat of the Egyptian collection at the Kelsey was the museum's mummy, housed in a quiet little cave built into a wall. It's the mummy of a little boy or girl around three-years old. The museum acquired the mummy with little provenance from an organization that had purchased the little guy (or girl) on the black market in the 1860s. I'm sure you can imagine the questions I heard about the mummy of a three-year-old. I had to hear talk about the "little kid mummy" for weeks.

Poor Gram, I think we bored him with all that Shawabti talk:


 I have to throw in another shot from the Villa of Mysteries reproduction at the Kelsey. It just makes such a cool background:


The only other mummy on display in Michigan was the mummy that captured my own imagination in childhood, across the state in Kalamazoo. On the way, of course we had to stop at this pyramid:


When I jokingly suggested we go inside to try to find a mummy, both kids seemed legitimately scared to do so. Some mummy hunters. They prefer mummies in museums to those inside a local furniture company's former corporate development center that for some reason was designed to look like an actual pyramid:


On the drive down to Kalamazoo, the girl asked me to tell (for the thousandth time) what it was like for me to visit the mummy there when I was a kid. When I was young it was displayed in a large phony tomb guarded by the statues of two jackals, and I described the fear and awe of ascending along the darkened ramp into the tomb, past recessed funerary objects and a fake Rosetta Stone, to the windows where you'd peak into the well-lit burial chamber, its walls painted in hieroglyphics and the mummy lying still and dark in her ancient coffin. My daughter never tires of this story, and when we got to the Kalamazoo museum, all of those stories made her a little reticent to go over and take a look at the actual mummy, displayed with less pomp behind glass (but today you can get a much better look at her than when I was a kid). Here she is avoiding looking at it:


Eventually she braved up so she could show the mummy to her brother. When they peeked real close, she noticed some white stuff in the mummy's eye socket and said, "Oooh, it looks like a bird pooped in her eye."


I just realized the Kalamazoo mummy has a twitter account. I don't even have a twitter account. What is up with all these mummies and social media? I hope the Kalamazoo mummy signs up for Facebook so she can friend request the one in Ann Arbor. How cool would it be if bored museum interns all over the world made facebook pages for the mummies in their museums. . .ah, eternal life (at least, for those mummies who were lucky enough not to be ground into a powder and served in some warty medieval coot's chamomile tea).

Eventually we hope to travel even further to visit some more lonely, web-savvy rust-belt mummies, (there are a few down in Indiana and Southern Ohio we hope to see one day). But we had a lot of fun visiting all the mummies that were within a few hours' drive, and the visits provoked a lot of interesting questions and discussions on the car trips home. This is what I'm going to miss, when she's in school. We won't be able to hop in the car on any old weekday and drive for an hour or so to see something we can't see at home. But we have all summer, and I have some more adventures planned.

 

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