Maumee Bay State Park is a grand place to stay for a few days. Here’s a picture of Cal enjoying the site.

It’s the only picture I took, and it doesn’t show how our site was buffered on the left and right by trees and shrubs for complete privacy. It was always especially fine to come home to this spot after being out.

Maumee Bay is on Lake Erie just east of Toledo. As nice as this spot was, we left it for two nights to visit my brother Marcus and his wife Heidi. They live on the west side of Toledo, in Sylvania on the Ohio-Michigan border.

They have a lovely patio full of beautiful flowers and plants. It’s a great spot to look out and enjoy watching all of the varied birds that stop by their multiple feeders. Can you spot the two tiny yellow finches?

On our first morning at their house, we enjoyed a delicious breakfast on their patio.

Father’s Day was particularly special with the arrival of their daughter Rebecca, son-in-law Cyril, and their two sons.

They went out of their way to make sure all of the Dads were properly feted with a grilled hamburger cookout, cards and gifts.

All the partying and fun over, we set out to the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan for a day at Greenfield Village. Henry Ford himself assembled this open-air museum full of the homes, shops and workplaces of famous (and not so famous) Americans.

Here I am standing on the porch of the house that Ford grew up in. A road construction project threatened to destroy his birth home in 1919. Rather than see it destroyed, he moved and restored it to the way it looked about the time that his mother passed.

Ford’s inventive beginnings go back to his work on the new idea he had – a “quadricycle” constructed in a shed behind the duplex he and his wife were renting. It was completed in 1896. This shed is reconstructed, with some bricks from the original shed included.

There were two failed attempts at starting a business but finally, in 1903, Ford founded the Ford Motor Company.

When Ford made his money, he began collecting. This idea had its roots in his relocation of his birth house. He liked those things that represented American ingenuity and inventiveness. And so, Orville and Wilbur Wright’s house is here, too, along with their bicycle shop. In the back, they were building their first airplane to be flown at Kitty Hawk.

Ford didn’t stop with the Wright Brothers. A visitor can see a replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. The homes of Robert Frost and Luther Burbank and the George W. Carver cabin, slave cabins, and other homes of people I knew and didn’t know have been moved to Greenfield Village. A few are reconstructions. And not just homes and workplaces, but craftsman shops and working farms, too. It takes all day to see the village, and it feels like a step back in time.

Folks can go for a ride in a Ford Model T, and seeing these around town added to the feeling of being in another era, if only for a day.

One of my personal favorites was the Noah Webster home. Webster completed the American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 while living here.

The book is on display:

What I did not know before this is that it was Webster himself, by publishing his dictionary, who differentiated American English from British. He is why we have words like “color” instead of “colour”, “theater” instead of “theatre”, “magic” instead of “magick”. He added very American words such as “tomahawk”. There are 70,000 words in it, 12,000 more words in his dictionary than had been in any dictionary to this time. And here’s one for your next trivia night: it was the last dictionary written by one person.

We lunched at Eagle Tavern, the same building that was run by Calvin Wood in the 1850’s. The selections on the menu are from recipes and food that was available in that day. I had dumplings with cooked vegetables and a “cherry effervescent” to drink, which was listed as a “temperance beverage”. We had a lit candle on our table; it was a little dark inside even at lunchtime.

One last favorite of mine to show you is a home and outbuildings from the Cotswold area of England that Ford had dismantled and reconstructed here. It was originally built in the early 1600’s and lived in until the mid 1850’s. The only thing missing for me is the thatched roof and honestly, not all of them had them. I suppose a thatched roof would have required a lot of maintenance.

The stone walls are hiding the beautiful flower garden that is also here.

Just outside of Greenfield Village is the Henry Ford Museum, which is a fascinating place in itself. We’ve been there, so we skipped it. We would have had to pass on some of the Village in order to visit all of that in a day.

So, back to our life back in Maumee Bay…

On our first morning, we had errands to run. As we drove up to the Verizon store, we noticed vintage cars coming towards us. Business complete (I got a new phone!), we stepped out and noticed they were still coming. Cal needed a haircut, and I had brought things to do to sit in the truck while I waited. I did not need to do those things, because the parade of cars and pickup trucks kept going the entire time he was in there.

Later, I found out that there were over 200 of them making their way to a car show. The hotels in town had all been full the night before.

We took a bike ride on our last day to explore the park. Just outside of it, we saw an Ohio city sign. I remember these sitting just inside every town when I was growing up, but there aren’t many of them around any more.

Thanks to Google, I found a little history on the two men noted on the sign. Peter was a noted French settler here and built a cabin in 1807. He He and his brothers saw active duty in the war of 1812, although he was not on the enlistment rolls. He traded with the local Indians and could speak their dialect. Autokee was known for his honesty, friendliness, and for being the last Ottawa chief in the Maumee Valley.

Our bike trail ended at the water where we could see Maumee Bay opening up onto Lake Erie.

We rode past a pretty lighthouse, but it was privately owned so we couldn’t get closer.

And we also rode past two little skunk babies sitting on the edge of the trail. I really wanted to stop and take a picture because they were so cute. I was fairly certain Mama was in the grass nearby, though, so I didn’t stop.

We went back to my brother’s house on our last night in town. His two granddaughters, Eliza and Emilynn, had just flown in from Hawaii, accompanied by their other grandmother Joy. The next day Rebecca and her family were set to leave for France to visit Cyril’s parents. Dinner was a celebration of comings and goings.

Growing up, tuna macaroni salad was something my mother made in the summer time. It may be a midwest throw-back to the 1960’s, but I still enjoy it and make it for Cal and I on our travel days. It’s nice to have something just to pull out of the refrigerator and eat. I was delighted that Marcus and Heidi enjoy this dish too, as well as their whole family, and they made it for supper. Heidi even made a smaller dish without onions, just for me!

Next time – a day in northwest Indiana