Monday was after the end of the convention, of course, and we got our last walk around the hotel while Anthrohio people cleared out rooms and supplies and stuff like that. Also our last(?) photos of the hotel.
For lunch, Hot Head Burritos probably being too dangerous to eat in the car (at least for me, the driver), I nominated White Castle. And to go inside, because the flashing rotating menu boards had suggested something interesting-sounding in the Coke Freestyle machine and I wanted to see what it was. My fussing around with the machine, looking at the options, while the cashier was helping someone else drew a warning from the cashier that I couldn't use outside drink containers here. Well, yeah, no problem, I just wanted to use time more efficiently, you understand. Anyway that --- and the observation that the bathrooms had door access codes, printed on the bottom of the receipt, led us to a question: is this a bad neighborhood?
Because, y'know, we like the area but ... hm. Fast food places with number-locked bathrooms. The roads being so busy there's a limited-access highway flanked by less-limited-access roads so you can get to the endless series of strip malls. The Crown Plaza Hotel, with its gently decaying facade and the pool outside it gradually giving way to algae and Canada geese, with the lights that might make it an evening exercise place broken or removed entirely. The dwindling number of fast-food chain buildings reopened as attempted fast-fod places that close within a year. The still-standing Continental complex of mixed-use apartments and mall and movie plaza, none of it used. Maybe this is a shabby part of town. Huh.
We like doing something on Mondays to take the edge off of returning to normal life. The Columbus Zoo would be nice but Memorial Day, in our limited experience, draws out everybody in the world to the zoo and the amusement park it absorbed, mitochondria-like, into its terrain. We did Cedar Point last year and that was great, but we'd just been there a week previously. (But would that have been so bad?) We decided the thing to do was one we'd done a couple times and enjoyed, and was the reason we'd brought our letterboxing gear that worked out so well for the cryptid stamps game: see if we couldn't get a stamp on the way home.
The target was one at a battle site in Maumee, Ohio, the town we otherwise know as where the Speedway we always stop at on the way to and from Cedar Point is. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger asked me, the history-knower, what battle was in Maumee and I could only stammer, ``The ... battle of ... Maumee?'' She didn't call me out on my bluff. I wasn't at all sure, but from the location supposed that the likely cases were one of the Anglo-American Wars (Revolution, 1812), maybe a war of Indian genocide, possibly the French-and-Indian War. The correct battle was the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and it was in the 1790s, one of the wars of Indian genocide, although fed by the aftermath of the American Revolution, in that time when the British were turning over Northwestern Territory forts just as fast as the Americans paid for seized Loyalist property. The Indians of the area, who hadn't been consulted on any of the peace settlement, were getting British support in weapons and food and such, but not men or intelligence or such.
Still, they were doing tolerably well, so ``Mad'' Anthony Wayne was sent out in 1794 with the Legion of the United States. After a ferocious battle lasting about seventy minutes Wayne had won and could follow up with burning out Indian villages and crops.
The interpretative center for the site was closed, it being Memorial Day, but the grounds were open and it turned out the letterbox clues did not need us to go indoors. (We had thought a description of moving counterclockwise referred to following paths leading off of the compass rose outside the center. They meant instead going along the walking trail.) Also while we were sitting, ready to stamp things, an older man came up to compliment bunnyhugger's Stern Pinball jacket. He was a pinball owner himself, having a couple rare and, really, exciting tables, such as one from the Italian maker Zaccaria or the short-lived Capcom line of games. He would come back later, before leaving, to ask if she might know someone who could fix games of that vintage. Her best bet, given his location on the west side of Michigan? RLM Amusements; if RLM can't get out there himself he'll probably know someone.
As hinted, our letterbox-finding was a success; bunnyhugger had barely finished reading the clue at our first stop when I reported finding it. And after that, we took the walk around the mile-and-a-half loop, figuring it was a good chance to get her daily walk in before the rain that sure seemed ready to arrive any moment yet never did.
While we hoped to get back to driving speedily enough we had to pull off for a bathroom break, and on the way to that Speedway discovered the huge empty parking lot that used to be a Big K mart. The sign still stood, although everything else was a weed-encroached empty parking lot. We couldn't resist taking photos of that; bunnyhugger even had her film camera, for extra artistic desolation.
We picked up our pet rabbit in the evening, staying just long enough with bunnyhugger's parents that they probably would have had us eat something. But we wanted to get home rather than risk giving them Covid-19, if we'd got it at the con. We did not, so, all turned out as well as we could have hoped.
Next blog: what could we possibly have done between the end of May and the middle of June, and which roller coasters was it?
We continue my ambling around the neighborhood with some more pictures of places you've already seen photographed, if you've been looking at my pictures long enough.
Walking down the service road next to US 127 here. They had signs up promising the streets were going to be closed off for so long that it came as a surprise when the streets actually were.
Earlier in the year I'd taken some pictures of those three abandoned houses under the Lottery signs; they were supposed to be demolished soon. As you can see, by early October, they were still there.
I took almost this same photo in spring 2023. I would not take it in spring 2024, as somewhere around February or so they finally did demolish these old houses.
The houses were not quite triplets but they did look like variations on a theme.
Getting back closer to home. This is the bicycle co-op that's so close it's embarrassing I haven't brought my bike there to have them check it out and do any maintenance needed. Also to get a helmet that fits.
The building on the left used to be a school, but as Lansing's elementary-school age population dropped to about sixteen kids they shuttered and sold the buildings off to companies like the not at all ominously named Neo-Gen corporation.
Trivia: Joe Jackson, 1875 - 1942, was an Austrian comic trick bicyclist who came into vaudeville when he ran into financial difficulties touring England as a champion sports cyclist. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide. Jackson's United States debut was in June 1911 at New York Citys' Fifth Avenue Theater. Story is that he died while appearing at the Roxy, closing his first performance of the day with five curtain calls and remarking to a stagehand, ``My, they're still applauding'', before dropping dead walking back to his dressing room.
Currently Reading: The Best Of The Spirit, Will Eisner. Finally hit the story where the bad guy is playing pinball and, of course, tilting. One implausible note: the title and the narrator have informed us the guy has ten minutes to live, and if there's one thing anyone who plays pinball knows, if you have a deadline like that facing you it is impossible to lose the ball or tilt the machine, the universe simply will not let you. Otherwise good little story with just the right does of cosmic irony to it.
