Day 25: Travel Day
Welcome
Yesterday we had a rest day and drove to Detroit, Michigan.
That freezing mid-winter night in 2019 when we played at the Beachland Ballroom, our friend Rachel Lawrence had kindly invited us to stay at her family home, only a few blocks from the venue. When we got there after the show her father GL was waiting in the kitchen and proceeded to cook us a midnight snack of breakfast foods: chocolate chip pancakes, French toast, and omelettes. This beautiful hospitality has continued to live on as one of our fondest and most vivid tour memories, and that’s why we were very excited yesterday morning to be visiting GL’s diner, the Lakeshore Coffee House, open since 1992.
GL greeted us with smiles and hugs when we arrived and invited us inside, into a cosy room that had been thoroughly decorated; paintings, vintage coffee tins, and old grinders adorned every wall and shelf. We sat around a couple of tables catching up and then we were treated to a breakfast on the house from the simple menu scrawled on a chalk board behind the counter. I ordered an egg and cheese sandwich on white toast and added a hashbrown to the inside of the sandwich.
We said goodbye to our friends and hopped back in the van, driving for twenty minutes to get to our next stop, which was in downtown Cleveland, right on the waterfront. Kayleen parked us right outside a large glass pyramid that I thought was a knock-off of the Louvre until I discovered that these two buildings share the same architect, Ieoh Ming Pei. This was the Rock’n’roll hall of fame, a museum dedicated to preserving and showcasing the artefacts belonging to some of the great musicians of the last hundred years. We laid our eyes upon the likes of Elvis Presley’s Harley Davidson, John Lennon’s glasses, Aretha Franklin’s hat, and Elizabeth Cotton’s guitar. There was also a room called ‘the garage’ with exposed 2x4s on the walls and a large assortment of instruments lying around. An in-house band is on call in this room from 12-4pm and they have a repertoire of 60 songs if you feel like having a jam.
The drive to Detroit was short and sweet, heading west along I90, curving around the bottom of Lake Eerie, and at Toledo hopping onto I75 to head north for the last stretch. At the western end of Lake Eerie is the Detroit River, a 44km waterway which connects this Great Lake with its northern neighbour Lake St. Clair. The city of Detroit sprawls along the western bank of this river, less than a kilometre away from the city of Windsor, Ontario, on the east bank. This is the location of the busiest border crossing in North America, with tens of thousands of vehicles per day crossing between the United States and Canada over the Ambassador bridge or through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
Driving through northern Ohio.
We reached the hotel and found to our surprise that instead of the usual Holiday Inn Express were staying at an artisan, boutique hotel. There is a touchscreen TV in the lobby from which you can send an electronic post card, there is a fitness centre with an inspirational sign, and there are plenty of nicely-framed photographs lining the corridors. Kayleen was lucky enough to be housed in the Rolling Stones suite, a masterfully-decorated space that once had the honour of hosting the Rolling Stones (according to the concierge).
Everyone was grateful to have the night off and we spent the remainder of the evening in our rooms, catching up on work, and sleep.
Jon and Liz working on their secret recording project.
I’ll leave you with Tristan’s latest piece of video, highlights from the last few days of traveling.
