July 12, 2018

Tinsley Park, Illinois to Windsor, Ontario

We woke up to a hot Chicago morning, ready to hit the road. We were glad to slip through rush hour Chicago traffic easily.

We quickly drove through Illinois, Indiana, and arrived in Michigan. We were driving around the southern end of Lake Michigan which accounts for going so rapidly through these three states.

Our major goal for the day was our next presidential library: The Gerald Ford Presidential Museum. Usually, the presidential libraries and museums are together, except for The Ford. The museum part is in Grand Rapids Michigan with the library on the other side of the state in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Because the library portions tend to be mostly of interest to researchers, for the average visitor, the museums are a much broader interest. So that's where we headed for today.

Gerald Ford had a short presidency, from 1974 to 1977. He is the only president who has not been elected to the office of either President or Vice President. He became Vice-President when Spiro Agnew resigned and then he took over after Richard Nixon resigned before an impeachment trial.

As is common in these museums about presidents, we learned about the childhood and early life of both Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty Ford. They were both from Michigan and lived interesting fairly regular lives. Ford had been an Eagle Scout as a teenager. Betty was a model and a dancer, and Jerry Ford went to law school, served in the Navy and then ran for Congress from the state of Michigan. He won the election first for Congress a few days after they were married. He was always known as a hard worker and pretty straight shooter kind of a guy. He worked his way up through Congress and interestingly was part of the Warren Commission exploring who shot John F Kennedy. He had a solid experience in Congress and didn't seem to have aspirations for high-level national office.

Then he got tapped by Nixon to fill in as the Vice-President after Spiro Agnew had to resign. And then less than a year after that, Nixon resigned and Ford was thrust into an office and a very difficult time, in a country that was reeling from Watergate.

There were many things clamoring to get Ford’s attention, but heaviest on his heart was how divided the country was in regards to Watergate and what should happen with Richard Nixon. After one month, he announced he was granting Nixon a full and complete pardon and no further legal action would be happening towards him. He was fearful that it would take years to go through the prosecution process and would keep an open wound and suffering in the American psyche during all that time. This was a highly controversial decision. It appears that most people who at that time highly criticized him for this decision later came to believe that it was probably the best decision for the country. Most experts agree that deciding to pardon Nixon likely cost Ford the election in 1976.

We were struck in our time both at this museum and at the one dedicated to Hoover, that both men had reputations of being honorable and truthful.  We hear their words with different ears in our current political time.

Following the Ford Museum, we made a straight trip across the state of Michigan. It was rather non-eventful without too much traffic. Until we reach Detroit. There we slogged through quite a bit of traffic until we finally reached the point where we were going against the traffic. Yay! We drove for quite a while at 75 miles an hour. We were happy to think we were going to arrive soon at our hotel just across the border in Windsor Canada. However, there was the wait in the line at customs to go through. Sigh! Inching ahead it seems like they took three or four minutes each car. We were asked very pointedly about the weapons we had in the car, and when we denied having any guns along, he asked about what weapons we had at home.  When we again declared no guns, the custom’s agent said that we were mythical creatures such as unicorns:  Americans with no guns. Finally, we were through. Just before we turned off our cell phone GPS in order not to use international data, the cell phone announced welcome to Canada. We would now spend a nice long weekend in Canada.