After Chicago, where I felt fairly safe, I was prepared for any American city, right?
The plan was to ride straight through Detroit, but to my amazement an event was going on, called Detroit Couch Crash 2012. They expected 40+ people to show up, and had plenty of space to crash, so I figured, why not? I ended up staying 2 nights, the first I spent in their bus, the second camping.
About the bus, this group of organizers also does a trip to Burning Man every year. They had an even nicer bus with a kitchen, bathroom, etc which broke down on them last year. So they were stranded and ended up buying a 1994 Thomas school bus for $3k. Who knew a bus was so affordable? Hint to my friends reading this...
This event was also known as Detroit Camp City. The idea is that they make a few activities, and your goal is to iron on "merit badges" onto a white t-shirt. There were about 9 of them for various activities like "Just showing up" and "arts", which you earned by grabbing a can of spraypaint and painting the school bus as pictured below.
The plan was to ride straight through Detroit, but to my amazement an event was going on, called Detroit Couch Crash 2012. They expected 40+ people to show up, and had plenty of space to crash, so I figured, why not? I ended up staying 2 nights, the first I spent in their bus, the second camping.
About the bus, this group of organizers also does a trip to Burning Man every year. They had an even nicer bus with a kitchen, bathroom, etc which broke down on them last year. So they were stranded and ended up buying a 1994 Thomas school bus for $3k. Who knew a bus was so affordable? Hint to my friends reading this...
This event was also known as Detroit Camp City. The idea is that they make a few activities, and your goal is to iron on "merit badges" onto a white t-shirt. There were about 9 of them for various activities like "Just showing up" and "arts", which you earned by grabbing a can of spraypaint and painting the school bus as pictured below.
I slept on the bus, in the street, near the old train station, which is used for filming a lot. I didn't know at the time, but around the corner was a shelter, and a few blocks away was a real camp city where the homeless had erected a half dozen tents.
The location of the DCC camp was interesting, it was a 4 lane road with a bunch of abandoned buildings, and when you looked down it towards downtown it was very post apocalyptic. The outskirts of Detroit are very abandoned and very run down. Nothing is going on.
I had some great Mexican food the first night, this area of the states has great authentic Mexican.
The next day I formed a 4 person clique and explored the city with the help of Nicoli (the other guy in this picture) and his sweet Mini Cooper. We stopped at the Eastern Market to have some BBQ and watch Karaoke.
Luckily, things were spiced up even more when Prince showed up all done up and performed 2 hits for us.
We ended up along the riverwalk, laying on the grass talking about CS and looking across at Windsor, ON.
There was a great party on the second night, where we were camping in the yard of one of the organizers.
Several people witnessed me dozing off in front of the fire, a sweet gal named Janée woke me up with a glass of water and voiced some concern about me falling into the fire. She's pictured on the far right in our little clique above.
I woke up after a nice night's rest to find this guy right next to my face. I saw him before I went to bed and thought I had taken a piece of paper and scooped him out and dropped him outside.
In my drunken state I must have gingerly knocked him off the tent wall and onto my tank bag instead, and then shaken the piece of paper free of nothing! I'm still laughing about this. Oh well.
Social commentary on Americans: fat Captain America. The story about this is that a group of LA street artists came out here to show the artists of Detroit how it's done. This was a bit of an insult to the Detroiters who felt that local artists should have been recruited. As a result, even the really nice works were vandalized. Captain America had "go home" tagged on his belly, which was then repaired.
On the last day I did a couple of things.
First, the former Motown recording studios. "Mo" because Detroit is Motor City.
Second, we went to Belle Isle park. The water is surprisingly blue as with Chicago, some people went swimming, and a guy who I ended up crashing with in London, ON brought a kite he flew. I tried to get some nice video by attaching one of my keychain cameras to the kite but it didn't come out well. We also went to the nature conservatory, which is basically a greenhouse with plants from all over the world.
About Detroit, I'd say that the city is 85% black, there is a lot of graffiti, the city is a bit grunge, but that's part of its charm.
The signature of Detroit is the GM Tower or "Ren Center", which is a iridescent blue fringed central tower with 4 sister towers arranged around. Here I am in front of it, just after we had some deep dish pizza
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