EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking near Detroit, Michigan
Distance - 190 miles
Time - 3 hours
I left Grosse Pointe nice and early because Kate was hitting the road to go to Canada for the day and I had told Wendy that I would make it to Cleveland by noon. We talked about my trip to Syracuse later in the week and she suggested that since I have my passport I could come back through Detroit and go through Canada to New York! I hadn't thought of that, but I love the idea so we'll see if we can make it work. It would let me actually see a little of Detroit and give me a nice break along the way from Columbus - it's not at all a direct route but I'd love to see a little of Canada while I'm so close.
I told Martha the GPS to avoid toll roads, so I took I-75 south to Highway 2. When I saw a cooling tower in the distance I started having the suspicion that I had driven this route before when I was driving out to college my senior year, which was confirmed when I passed the very memorable sign for the "Happy Hooker" fishing shop! Kind of an unexpected happy coincidence to end up on the same road.
After I arrived at Wendy's around noon, we got changed and headed to the Mandel Jewish Community Center where she had signed up to see a trainer and continue her rehab. It was very impressive - a fitness center and community center that had an extensive list of groups, events, and services, all housed in a beautiful new building. We had lunch afterwards at the Subway that was in the lobby, complete with soy cheese to keep kosher (I had never had soy cheese before but melted on turkey it was perfectly acceptable as a substitute).
We went home to change and started in on putting together a bookshelf that she had ordered. We had talked about going to a movie at 4, so we stopped when the directions told us to break out the glue, tidied up a little, and went over to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights. I wish I lived near a theater like this! It specializes in smaller films, the kind of quirky art house or foreign films that can be hard to find without waiting for it to come out on DVD or Netflix. There were several that we both wanted to see but we settled on Wadjda, about a girl in Saudi Arabia and her quest to own a bicycle in a country and culture where girls don't ride bikes. It was a sweet film that felt very genuine, plus it's the first feature film written and directed by a Saudi woman, shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. If you have the chance to see it, I would absolutely recommend it (it does have subtitles, so avoid it if you're not fond of reading your movies)
After the film we went to dinner at Bodega. It bills itself as a tapas restaurant, but be warned - some of the tapas are entree sized! Everything we tried was delicious, and we were one of only a few tables with customers despite it being 7:30pm (on a Wednesday, but still) so we had a lot of attention from our waiter when we wanted it. It does seem to be the kind of place that has a good bar crowd later in the night, but for dinner it's a perfect place to stop if you want a table right away. We each had an arugula salad with olives and goat cheese, then split the seared calamari and roasted mussels (the giant tapas plates), and an order of the lamb mrouzia. Way too much food, but every bit of it was so tasty! The broth that the mussels were served in was particularly wonderful. The chef is Moroccan, and if the lamb is any indicator I suspect that it would be very difficult to find something on that part of the menu that isn't superb.
Pictures from the road:
No comments:
Post a Comment