By The River

Of late, we come to Michigan about this time of the summer. We rent a cottage by Lake Michigan near my hometown of Holland and have a family reunion.

Our cottage this year overlooks Lake Macatawa, but is within easy walking distance of the Big Lake, as it is known. I can sit on the expansive front porch of this old Victorian cottage and watch boats of all descriptions sailing out of Lake Macatawa into Lake Michigan. Everything from Jet Skis to motor boats, to, improbably, a Chinese junk go cruising by.

The reunion was a couple of days ago at my uncle's cottage, which does front on Lake Michigan. The advantage here was a nice backyard and only about 25 steps down to the beach. We have rented cottages in the past with 50 or more steps. It isn't so much going down them as coming back up at the end of a blissful day.

Lake Michigan was very warm this year, probably about 72 degrees. Even my wife, notoriously finicky about coldish water, found it enjoyable. From our own cottage, we walk about a quarter mile along a relatively flat sidewalk that leads to our Lake Michigan beach. At one point the sidewalk splits into a high road and low road. The high road leads past magnificent Victorian cottages that cling to the side of the dune.

If I wanted to get political, I would call the high road the Obama path, and the low road the McCain path. But politics seem far away this week.

Posted by David at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can you find the toad in the photo above?

I've been traveling through northern Michigan with my daughter, Lydia. Michigan has always been famous for two things, autos and the north woods. The auto industry isn't doing so well of late, of late being the last 20-30 years. Anyone who thinks the rescue and rebuilding of America should be left to "private industry" should first consider the hash that these supposed titans made of an industry we created and took to greatness. Yup, Americans will always want big SUVs and big trucks. The Hummer! Yee ha! I'm driving a 45 mpg Toyota Prius, vintage 2005, on this trip, which makes the $4.19 per gallon gas in northern Michigan tolerable, if not pleasant. It's my wife's car, and she got a call from the Toyota dealer about a month ago asking if she wanted to sell it back to them. Lots of folks clamoring to buy a used Prius, it seems.

Michigan has not figured out a way to replace the huge gap in its economy left by the dying auto industry. We stopped Saturday night at the home in the far Detroit suburbs (Oakland County) of my cousin Kathy and her husband Jeff. He's had a very successful landscaping business, but a lot of his clients have gone with the hard times. Jeff is resourceful, though. He has commissioned some local engineers to build a small bio-diesel refinery for him and a few other small business owners. They'll use the fuel to run their trucks. And he's getting into the scrap metal business, which is booming in Detroit. I had this apocalyptic vision, with music by Eminem, of the end of Detroit. Vast empty areas where the houses and buildings have been scrapped. Only the Renaissance Center, Tiger Stadium, and the Greektown Casino remain.

So far, Michigan's great northern forest and its many rivers and streams endures. Ernest Hemingway enjoyed it in the early 20th century, writing about it in numerous short stories. Writers still come to northern Michigan for solace and inspiration. We stayed at the home in Suttons Bay in Leelanau County (the 'tip of the little finger' on the Michigan hand map) of my old friend Bill Perkins and his wife, the Newbery Award-winning children's book author Lynne Rae Perkins. Suttons Bay is a perfect little small town, with a new independent bookstore, Brilliant Books, run by an Englishman who rails against Amazon.com.

Bill and I and Lydia kayaked the other day on the Crystal River, a shallow, moderately-fast stream that winds through the cedar and tamarack forests on its way to Lake Michigan. I managed to tip over twice, Lydia a lot more than that. Very enjoyable, even if we ended up wet and shivering at the end.

And then we took the ferry out to South Manitou Island, part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore created by Congress in 1970. I was last here in August of 1974, when I camped by myself for a week and finished the Faulkner novels I had to read for a senior English seminar that fall at Hope College. I was going into my senior year. Nixon had just resigned, and I was happy. I lay on the beach and read "The Sound and the Fury" and dreamed of being a novelist (I settled for writing non-fiction books).

The island has a circumference of about 10 miles. There once were 13 farms on the island, most of them German immigrants, which must have made this an interesting little 19th century colony of my grandfather's homeland. The dunes on the west shore are spectacular, and forest is slowly reclaiming all of the farms except two the National Park Service decided to preserve. I doubt the park could have been created today. A number of unhappy private landowners, including some of these farmers, were evicted by Congress under eminent domain in the name of the greater public good. Whatever the rightness or wrongness of what Congress did, the public now has a wonderful national park for the ages.

We didn't have a lot of time, so we took the guided tour of some of the island highlights. We saw the inland lake on the island--a lake on an island in a lake--and met painted turtles, garter and ringneck snakes, and toads, which abound here. If you haven't found the toad in the photo above, it's in the middle of the photo and has an orange slug attached to its back. I know. Yuckfest. But it's part of nature.

Back in Leland, the fishing village where the ferry docks, we walked over to a lecture by Richard Peck, a children's book author from New York City who has also won the Newbery Award. He wanted to meet Lynne, so we all converged on his lecture at the Old Art Building in Leland, a perfect Chautauqua-type venue. Peck, who is about 74, is a polished performer in addition to being an accomplished writer. I didn't agree with everything he said. He's from the Allen Bloom "Those Darn Student Radicals Ruined Everything" school of criticism. A big critic of multiculturalism and big defender of teaching Latin, a dead language likely to remain dead. But he believes in the value of words and writing, and that is good. Peck drew a full house, and signed books until late in the night.

Now we're in Holland, my hometown, and visiting my old haunt, the Herrick District Library, where I am writing this blogpost. More on my travels later.

Posted by David at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"While it is necessary, it is no longer sufficient to protect ourselves against known or suspected terrorists; we must protect ourselves against people with no known affiliation to terrorism."
--Kip Hawley, administrator of U.S. Transportation Security Administration, in remarks to Congress about rail security, Oct. 20, 2005.

Amtrak announced today that it will conduct unannounced spot checks of boarding passengers and their carry-on luggage as part of the war against terrorism. While greater attention to rail security is long overdue--the rail unions have been vocal about this since 2001--the unique nature of rail travel is likely to make anyone chosen for a spot check feel like the unluckiest man or woman alive.

Here's how the AP described what will be done: "The [security] teams will show up unannounced at stations and set up baggage screening areas in front of boarding gates. Officers will randomly pull people out of line and wipe their bags with a special swab that is then put through a machine that detects explosives. If the machine detects anything, officers will open the bag for a visual inspection. Anybody who is selected for screening and refuses will not be allowed to board and their ticket will be refunded."

If you're not a regular Amtrak rider between Harrisburg and Philadelphia and New York, this might seem no more onerous than what airline passengers endure every day. But there's a big difference. Very few Amtrak passengers, and none on the trains between Harrisburg and Philadelphia and New York, have assigned seats. It's mostly open seating.

So while you wait for the explosives test to be conducted, the majority of passengers not chosen for spot checks will be boarding the train and grabbing most of the seats. On a busy travel day, you and your wife, or you and your wife and two children, may end up sitting far apart because only widely scattered single seats--possibly on different cars--are left. You may be dragging your luggage from car to car searching for those seats.

This won't be much of a problem for riders boarding in Harrisburg, where the trains originate and there is always plenty of seating. But it will be a problem when you get on the return train in New York's Penn Station, which on the best of days is a scene of barely organized chaos. Here's how it works in Penn Station: passengers for all the trains mill about in the waiting room, watching the train board intently for the gate to be announced for their train--it's always different. They then rush to that gate and crowd down a narrow escalator to the train platform.

It is hard to imagine where in the Penn Station waiting area these screenings could be done. My guess is they will do them on the platforms, where there is somewhat more ability to control the flow of people. Amtrak hasn't said whether trains will be delayed so screened passengers have time to board. The next train could be hours away. If you are forced to miss the last train of the night, who pays for your hotel and meals? Take a guess.

Anyone who thinks their status as a nice, white, middle class family on a weekend jaunt to New York will exempt them from these security screenings should re-read the quote that begins this post. But can you imagine how that family is going to feel if they are hauled out of line for screening, and then forced to sit in widely scattered seats, while someone who looks vaguely Middle Eastern goes on their merry way? Profiling, while unpleasant, is likely to catch more real terrorists than pretending an elderly white or African-American grandmother could be a human bomb.

The security problem is real. Imagine a suitcase bomb exploding in an Amtrak train as it passes under the Hudson River on the last leg of its journey to Penn Station. But this isn't the solution. Determined terrorists could arrange for their suicide bombers to get on the train at whistle-stop stations like Mt. Joy or Parkesburg that are unlikely to be visited by the screeners. Or have one bomber get on at one small station--there are nine of them between Harrisburg and Philadelphia--and one at another, knowing it was unlikely they would both be checked. Or for real, guaranteed impact, have the suicide bomber detonate in the crowded Penn Station waiting area. It is a nearly unsolvable problem.

One almost wonders if this is a back-handed attempt by the Bush Administration to destroy Amtrak by cutting not its appropriations--which it tries to do every year, while Congress puts the dollars back--but its supply of passengers willing to ride the trains. No business traveler or vacationing family who is seriously delayed or inconvenienced by a spot check is likely to ride Amtrak again, if there are alternatives. No one of questionable immigration status is going to risk being detected by the spot checkers, either.

A better solution, and one which Amtrak says it will employ in tandem with the spot checks, is to have more uniformed security in the stations--Penn Station has plenty of this already--and on the trains, accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Posted by David at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was at its worst yesterday when we were driving back 635 miles from Holland, Michigan, to Harrisburg, PA. I don't know why I was surprised--this happens nearly every year on the Sunday after Thanksgiving--but the mess this year seemed especially bad.

Traffic crawled along at 15-20 mph or slower on the stretch of the Turnpike between Pittsburgh and Breezewood, where large numbers of drivers returning from the Midwest and western Pennsylvania get off on I-70 to head down to Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. We were moving in a pack with the same vehicles for much of that stretch. There was plenty of time, for example, to read all the bumper stickers on the back of the Talmudic Academy van, or the ads for a Wisconsin bed-and-breakfast on the mud flaps of a tractor-trailer. Very clever that!

I will give credit to the Turnpike Commission or PennDOT, whichever was in charge, for having moving electronic signs alerting drivers to upcoming "congestion," which was putting it mildly. There are also AM 1610 radio broadcasts at key points. Although they sound like they were recorded in a roomful of kids, they do provide a modicum of information about the traffic nightmare you're about to face.

The Turnpike badly needs a third lane on both the eastbound and westbound sides between the New Stanton and Fort Littleton exits--congestion approaching Breezewood was bad on the westbound side as well. There are third lanes in a few places, but most of that stretch is two-lane. I suppose the powers-that-be will argue that it isn't worth all that expense (possibly including new tunnels as well) to handle the traffic on one or two days of the year. But I have to think that having third lanes would also help when accidents occur at any time of the year, making it more likely that traffic can continue moving around an accident scene.

We decided to take a dinner break from the slow-moving traffic at Bedford. The eastbound exit lane is a single lane, and it was backed up nearly to the Turnpike. There are no EZ Pass-only lanes at Bedford, so motorists like us with EZ Pass have to wait in line behind people paying cash tolls, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of EZ Pass.

Rest areas also need attention. There was no excuse for overflowing waste cans and empty towel dispensers in the restrooms. On a busy travel day, you put on more maintenance people. Harder to solve are the tiny food service areas at some of the rest areas, and the poorly-designed traffic flows to the gas pumps. Charging $3.17 per gallon for regular at the Somerset rest area, by the way, verged on price gouging to take advantage of all those travelers.

All in all, we were quite happy to pull into Shipoke. It turned out that our neighbors, Gene and Carol Gangwish, had gotten caught in the same Turnpike traffic mess we had. We unpacked, watched the Eagles valiantly fight the Patriots, and then fell asleep.

Posted by David at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

All of my adult life, strangers have stopped me and asked for directions. Everybody gets asked for help now and then, but I get this a lot. I'm not sure why. Maybe I look like I know where I'm going, or at least don't look threatening. Probably both are true. Most times this happens in Harrisburg, Pa., where I live. The most recent supplicant was a guy who pulled into the Patriot-News parking lot as I was crossing the entrance and asked me how to find 7th Street. Good question: unless he was careful, he would have trouble getting there from 812 Market Street unless he knew to take a detour off Walnut Street through what appears to be a parking lot.

I used to get a lot of requests for help finding the PennDOT building when it was still at the corner of Commonwealth and North Streets. A lot of out-of-towners, average folks for the most part, had to go there to renew licenses and registrations or what-not. With PennDOT's move to Front & Sycamore streets south of Shipoke, I don't get nearly as many of those anymore. But finding the new building can still be confusing, despite the signs. I live in Shipoke, and once in awhile someone will stop their car in front of my house with a befuddled look on their face. At least there's plenty of free parking at the new location.

I even get stopped and asked for directions in New York City, which makes me believe it's something about the way I look. I used to say, sorry, I'm a tourist, too, but now I've been there enough, at least to Manhattan, that I can often help them.

Even I get lost sometimes, and like most men, I don't like to ask for directions. In New York, figuring out which direction to walk when you exit a subway station can be a real challenge. Which way is east? which is west? Unless you've paid careful attention to the direction the train was traveling in relation to where you exited the station, it often falls into the "your guess is as good as mine" category. The two stations I use the most, Park Ave. at 28th St., and Spring Street, one of the SoHo stations, were particularly confusing in that respect, but I finally memorized enough mental cues that I could head in the right direction 90 percent of the time. At least if I was paying attention.

All of this was an introduction to a great idea New York City has some up with. They're going to place directional decals on sidewalks outside of subway stations. The decals will show north, south, east, and west and which direction to walk to get to a particular street. It's a great idea, at least until they're covered with snow and ice, but I do feel a small sense of personal loss.

After all, how often do you get an opportunity to tell a New Yorker where to go?

Posted by David at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Whoever thinks about the Atlantic time zone? Ever hear of it? It includes the Maritime Provinces of Canada, basicly everything in North America east of Maine. Prince Edward Island, where I am this week, is one hour ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.

Which means that we get the Harry Potter novel an hour before you back in Pennsylvania do. Nah, nah, nah, nah.

Pottermania is as evident here on Prince Edward Island as everywhere else. The two main bookstores in Charlottetown, a branch of the Indigo chain and a local independent, are having Harry Potter parties tonight, with sales beginning at midnight. We're going to the independent, where we'll pay $38 Canadian for one copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If we could wait until we cross the American border, it would be $22 U.S. Worse, the Canadian stores are charging the full $99 list price for the audiobook version, even though Indigo is offering it for $65 on its website.

So we decided to wait until we get to Bangor, Maine, to pick up the audiobook for the thousand mile ride back to Harrisburg this weekend. $47 is the price at the Borders store there. Much better. The ride will be enjoyable, provided they're not sold out by the time we get there.

Posted by David at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We were driving my elder daughter to vet camp yesterday morning and were still on the dirt road that leads from the cottage. All of a sudden, a large cow jumps a fence (or went through an opening, I'm not sure which) and comes onto the road about 200 feet in front of us, followed by three large calves. My wife was driving and was not pleased at what she saw. We creeped up on them. At about 100 feet, she tapped on the horn to get them to move.

Bad move (although I suggested it). The mama cow turned and started running at us, followed by the calves. Lisa backed the car up as fast as she could--this was very like the scene in "Jurassic Park" where the Land Rover full of humans is fleeing the dinosaur. I, of course, whipped out my camera and began shooting (this did not go over well in the car). We finally stopped, and the mini-herd moved past us.

We later learned that bad cow-human encounters are not at all uncommon. They aren't the peaceful, placid, cud-chewing creatures you've been led to expect, especially if mama cow is protecting her calves. For whatever reason, the beep of the horn was interpreted as an aggressive act and she reacted accordingly.

No sign of the cows this morning. But as I was driving down Highway 6, I saw a moving mound of black and white fir on the highway ahead of me. As I got closer, I saw it was a mama skunk and four little skunks trying to cross the road. I hit the brakes, fortunately in plenty of time. The skunks scurried back to to the field alongside the road to await better crossing conditions. They didn't spray, thankfully.

Posted by David at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To get to Prince Edward Island, you drive, and drive, and drive. It is just over a thousand miles from my home in Harrisburg, Pa. Even from Boston, it is nearly 600 miles. That distance has protected the island from the mass tourism that overwhelms beautiful islands along the Atlantic Coast in the U.S. You can buy oceanfront property here for a fraction of what you would pay further south, and the water is warm in summer, not frigid at all.

We came here because my eldest daughter was accepted into the one-week veterinary camp at the Atlantic Veterinary College of the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. She's the only American in the camp this week. The school is a good one, with a special research interest into diseases of fish and shellfish, two mainstays (along with potatoes) of the local economy. This morning she observed "large animal surgery," probably on a horse. I'm waiting to hear how that went. The school (as opposed to the camp) takes 18 Americans or other foreigners into each year's class of 60. Students from the Maritime Provinces of Canada pay a subsidized $9,500 a year, and Americans pay $44,000 a year for tuition, room, and board.

The Canadian dollar is nearly at par with the U.S. dollar. Just a few years ago, it was worth 66 cents to the U.S. dollar and travel here was dirt cheap. An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning attributed the rising Canadian dollar to the rise in world oil prices--Canada is a major supplier of oil to America--and to the U.S. trade deficit with China, a persistent and damaging drain on our economy.

Prince Edward Island is one of the whitest places I've ever been. Blacks and Asians are nearly non-existent here. The island is also one of the more friendly and well-mannered places you'll ever hope to visit. IIt is almost unnerving. Drivers automatically stop for pedestrians, even in the absence of a crosswalk (note to Prince Edward Islanders--don't expect that in Harrisburg, Pa.). We had a flat tire yesterday and pulled onto a side road. While I was in the process of changing it, a complete stranger stopped and made sure we were okay. He recommended a place to get a new tire and said he would swing past later to check on us.

We're staying in Crescent Isle Cottages on Tracadie Bay, down a long dirt road where we regularly see a mother fox and her cubs. There are scores of similar cottage colonies on PEI set up to serve, primarily, middle-class Canadian tourists. I walked down to the bay on Sunday night with my wife and a man and woman and their dog were digging clams. The bay is a major source of blue mussels. This is seafood heaven, although cheap lobster is as distant a memory here as it is anywhere else. You can buy them fresh for $12.95 a pound, which isn't bad, but the famous lobster suppers cost about $30 a head.

All in all, this is a special place, far enough from the world to seem lost in time, yet close enough to have all the modern conveniences.

Posted by David at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We left Harrisburg, Pa., on vacation Friday, driving up to Prince Edward Island in Canada for a week. Because it is a journey of a thousand miles (the single step was into the car), we took my wife's 2005 Toyota Prius instead of my larger, somewhat less fuel-efficient 2007 Honda CR-V. The Prius gets 45-50 miles per gallon on the highway, the CR-V about 27 mpg. On a trip that long, it is a significant difference.

The Prius averaged 47 mpg on the first tank of gas, which I purchased in Harrisburg just before we left. I didn't fill the tank again until we were in Massachusetts. As I did, I noticed that this gasoline contained 10 percent ethanol. Fine, I thought. That's what Gov. Rendelll wants everyone in Pennsylvania to be using in the very near future. Lets see how it runs.

Unfortunately, alcohol in the Massachusetts gasoline caused the Prius mileage to drop to 40-41 mpg. That's still good in the greater scheme of things, but you can't get past the fact it represented nearly a 13 percent decline in fuel efficiency. I drove most of that Mass. gas out of the car by the time I refueled in northern Maine. What I bought wasn't gasohol, and gradually the fuel efficiency climbed back toward 47 mpg.

I'm not willing to write off ethanol based on one tank of gas, but the experience was sobering to say the least.

Posted by David at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Baseball on a pleasant summer night. Two great teams, a nice breeze blowing in from Lake Michigan, and reasonably-priced beer and sandwiches. What could be better? Well, if the Detroit Tigers hadn't thought it was 2005, when they lost many, many games. They were shut out 5-0 by the Chicago White Sox at U.S. Cellular Field.

The Tigers have the best record in baseball this season, but you wouldn't have known it last night. They played like losers, while the Sox played like the 2005 World Series champs that they were. I've been a Tigers fan all my life but wondered for the last several years if they ever would be in playoff contention, let alone World Series contention again. This season they have won, and won, and won, but of course I go to see them on a really off night.

We rode the subway to the game, and it was packed with White Sox fans, many wearing the black and white pinstripes of the team. My daughters insisted on getting White Sox jerseys of their own, and cheered lustily for the team their father didn't support. But it was all good fun. The game was a near sell-out. Attendance was a shade over 39,000, and I didn't spot many empty seats, even in the upperest portions of the upper decks. There were a few in the right field bleachers, but that was all. It was Elvis Night at the game, so the place was overrun with Elvis impersonators and men wearing fake sideburns. All in all quite a show. We left after the Tigers went down in the 8th inning and the outcome seemed certain, hoping to beat the rush to the subway.

Chicago has been fun, although very expensive. I find it much moreso than New York, although perhaps that's because I know New York better. We drive up to Michigan today, where we have a cottage rented along Lake Michigan near Holland for the week. My uncle and his family are coming out from California to a nearby cottage, and some other relatives are coming for the day on Wednesday. On to the beach!

Posted by David at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We went to the sold-out King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago this morning. It was the first time the Tutankhamun antiquities have toured the U.S. since 1977 (a show I also saw at the Field). While I found the new exhibit to be nice, I feel compelled to warn anyone who saw the 1977 show that this is a very different sort of show. For one thing, many of the objects on display are from the time of Tut, not from the tomb. Perhaps most disappointing, the magnificent golden death mask is not in the exhibit, even though its image is used to the max in marketing materials and literature for the show. Whether Egypt wouldn't let it out of the country again or what, I don't know. But it isn't in the exhibit, and neither is the boy Pharaoh's sarcophagus. The 1977 show consisted almost entirely of objects recovered from the tomb, which was discovered by British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922.

Exelon, which owns Commonwealth Edison in Illinois and PECO Energy in Pennsylvania, was the major corporate underwriter for the show. Chairman John Rowe is an Egypt buff and has purchased Egyptian antiquities for his personal collection. That nearly scuttled Exelon's sponsorship at the last minute after Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, pitched a fit when he found out Rowe had a 2,600-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus on display in his corporate office. Hawass believes private ownership of antiquities is wrong, and shortly thereafter Rowe announced he would loan the sarcophagus to the Field Museum.

And can you imagine? They didn't have Steve Martin's "King Tut" playing in the background! :-)

Posted by David at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm on vacation in the Midwest with my wife and daughters, and yesterday we visited the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana. It is a collection of about a hundred of the sort of automobiles most people have only seen in movies. They were built here in Auburn for wealthy Americans, mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, and are among the most beautiful automobiles of all time. The museum is housed in the Art Deco former corporate headquarters of the Auburn company, which went out of business in 1937.

You gaze upon these automobiles--calling them "cars" seems inappropriate--and envision the Jazz Age and the world created by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. If Jay Gatsby didn't have one of these, he certainly wanted one. E.L. Cord, the salesman CEO who made the Auburn company what it was, knew how to create visually appealing automobiles.

Touring this museum was an education. I've always known that Detroit was not the only place in America where automobiles were built in the early 20th century, but didn't realize that Indiana had dozens of auto manufacturers. Some didn't stay in business very long, but others, like Auburn and Studebaker, were around for quite awhile. Many American children grew up in the 1950s and 1960s believing that Henry Ford invented the automobile, that most quintessentially American of inventions. In fact, Ford was merely among the more successful of many inventors of the auto the world over, all at about the same time.

Auburn, Indiana, is about 20 miles south of Interstate 80, and maybe 15 miles north of Fort Wayne. Like many old manufacturing centers of the Midwest, it is trying to find a new way in the 21st century.

Posted by David at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)