Alison flew back from school yesterday so we could participate in tomorrow's Tour de Troit bike ride. Rather than arriving at DTW, she decided to fly to O'Hare to take advantage of a great deal on airfare. Since I've driven to Chicago many times in roughly 3.5 hours, I had planned to pick her up in the Windy City and make a couple of fun side stops on the way home. Unfortunately, it took me almost twice as long as it usually does to get to O'Hare due to the worst traffic and construction delays I have ever experienced. Our visions of sight-seeing in Chicagoland went up in a cloud of expressway exhaust fumes. At some points I seriously could have run to O'Hare faster than I was moving on I-94.
As I was sitting on the highway, waiting... waiting... I mused about the bad rap we who still live in Michigan get for keeping the lights on in the only state to loose population in the 2010 census. In 1950, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States, with over 2,000,000 residents. As late as 1990 it was still in the top ten. Detroit's population is now lower than it has been in 100 years, far less than half of what it was in its heyday, and second only to New Orleans in percent population decrease in the last decade, at 25%. Detroit did to itself what it took Katrina to do to New Orleans.
I would like to tell the good folks in Chicago that there are some advantages to living in an area where the infrastructure was built to handle double the people than who currently live there. Here in the Motor City it is rare to have to sit on a highway for 4 hours just because there are still enough people working to have that much of a rush hour. Tomorrow Alison and I, along with 4,998 other happy riders will be very happy to enjoy what's left of Detroit from our bicycle seats. Today, I was just happy to be able to go faster than 5 mph for 18 minutes straight: in my sneakers!
Até amanhã...
9/23/11 - 2.0 miles | 17:59 min | 6.7 mph | 214 kcal <--- TWICE AS FAST AS I-94 IN CHICAGO AT RUSH HOUR !!!
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