Detroit-the tourist's view, Based on RL stop over. Options

[Snow_Fox]

OK chummers. I recently stopped through Detroit, Ares' hometown. Not there on biz, it was just point B on a trip from A to C and what little I saw was not what I was expecting. I thought I'd post here since often the visitor will see something locals take for granted and either actually residents could add to what I put in or other people passing through can chime in.

[CanRay]

Well, the Customs officers from Windsor, Ontario to Detroid, Michigan were very nice, searched through all my bags, and I caused the searcher mental anguish with the stuff in it.

I was going to GenCon.

And the Bus Station was very clean and the seats comfortable to sleep on while waiting the five hours for my connection bus.

[Snow_Fox]

When people think of Detroit the image is an industrial urban hell like Camden or Newark NJ with citizens cowering behined thick walls while an black industrial haze eternally cloud the sky.

Well my stop through didn't include down town but I did get a good look at the country side.

I expected to see masses of huge industrial buildings, like you have in Northern New Jersey. Instead I saw a lot of open and lightly wooded country side. There were industrial sites viewd but none looked more than a couple of stories tall-how far down they go is your guess, but this also stood out that in the outlying areas around Detroit, any building that was 3-4 stories tall really stood out. So lots of long low buildings.

There were also a huge number of pleasant looking (from 10,000 feet up) residential areas, mainly single houses with lots of trees around them.

The spaces between industrial/working sites and residential sites was pretty limited. It looked like they were often seperated only by a road. So it might be factory- 2 lanes of macadam then a pleasant neighborhood, like it was zoned by a corp who wanted to put stuff where ever they wanted, but still have nice neighborhoods. I just wouldn't want to have to chase a hard hit baseball over the road.

Parks were well laid out. I saw several that looked to be open ground for biking-though they could have just been building sites, and several spots that were clearly parks with winding pathes on them, making the most of limited space. there are also parks with multiple ball fields that seemed to show an incredibly well thought out. I mena often ball fields seem to face in on themselves so there is a risk of a ball hit well from field A going into the outsfield of field B. What I saw in Detroit were fields laid out with their home plates back to back- in fact since base ball fields are triangle shpaed, a square patch of ground has 4 fields on them. the home plates all at the center. I do wonder where spectators site and a homerun risks gonig into traffic but otherwise it seems great for league play and a limited use of space.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, it is the home of Ares Macrotechnology, one of the biggest most successful AAA megacorps in the world, but the airport was really nice. clean, efficient, easy to get around with an internal monorail that doesn't go outside of the security cordon so you don't have to recheck everything.

Minor as this sounds, the ladies room was clean and did NOT smell of cleaner. meaning there was a subtle scent to it. I know that sounds minor but it also means they are taking small details like that in mind meaning what other small things are the working on?