October 26 - Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan

Unfortunately, the Greenfield Village complex, like the Henry Ford Museum, didn’t open until 12 noon on Sunday, and I felt that was giving us fewer visiting hours per dollar—if you come you might try to schedule your visit for the other days of the week. But I used the morning hours to continue editing the journal for our last trip (Wanderung 3) and managed to get about 1/3 of the way thru it by the time we broke for a quick lunch at 11 o’clock. The Sunday traffic was light, so the drive over to the museum was quite quick. We were briefly delayed by finding the walk box for our Volksmarch, which turned out to be at the Visitors Center across the plaza from the entrance to Greenfield Village.

The route for the Greenfield Village Volksmarch involved about 5 kilometers in the village—for the other 5 you have a choice of walking on the adjoining suburban streets, walking a loop in the Henry Ford Museum, or walking a second lap around Greenfield Village. Choosing the museum loop would also require you to purchase admission to the museum, but our 2-day passes allowed unlimited entry to both village and museum so that was no problem. The only problem we had on both sections of this walk was that we wanted to stop and read or watch everything, and this complex is so rich in information that reading and watching take literally hours. Walking the route around Greenfield Village we visited Henry Ford’s home, the first Ford production plant, Ford’s grade school, the Wright brothers’ home and bicycle shop, Edison’s Menlo Park research facility, and that was all just on the first loop!

We finished up with another hour and a half in the Henry Ford Museum. As we had thoroughly criss-crossed parts of it the previous day, we settled for walking in the sections we had not finished. Monika also wanted to see the section on clocks so we did that first, then skimmed the history of silver and pewter goods in the U.S. Returning to the Industrial Revolution section, we followed it step by step to the section on assembly-line production methods. I learned at lot of things, some important, some trivial. Did you know the origin of the phrase “the real McCoy” was from an African-American inventor and tool manufacturer named McCoy who insisted on exceedingly fine tolerances from his workers? Now you do.

The machines in that section ranged from the absolutely huge old steam engines up to the fairly modern assembly line tools, and I was fascinated by the struggle for better, faster, and above all more precise tools over the last several centuries. I felt a certain kinship with the machinists and engineers of the 1800s—I even saw a 19th Century “pocket protector” that carried a whole set of machinists’ tools in a shirt pocket! The case was nice hard case and the set of tools—calipers, gauges, punches, stuff like that—looked really useful, too. Of course, nowadays that tool set would get me arrested and thrown in jail if I tried to get on an airplane with it! Even as it is I have to remember to take my Swiss Army knife off my key chain and leave it at home every time I travel by airplane—what a bother.

Predictably, I guess we finished this Volksmarch only when we were chased out of the museum at the 5 o’clock closing time. Having the walk route in Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum really makes this Volksmarch unique, in our opinion. As exercise, this walk is useless; you absolutely cannot keep up any kind of walking pace if you stop to read or watch demonstrations in the village or museums, but if you don’t do that, what’s the point? On the other hand, we were so busy learning and thinking and ogling things that we didn’t notice how tired we were after 5 hours of steady walking until we were back out in parking lot. What can I say—this is not your normal Volksmarch by any stretch of the imagination! I would certainly advise other folks to do this walk—actually I would recommend doing it in 2 full days so you can try to absorb it all, but that is truly absorbing information at a rate that is like drinking water from a fire hose! One thing I will guarantee you—you will get a lot of “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” as well as a boatload of history on this walk!

We returned thru the sparse afternoon traffic to our trailer for our supper, which became just a light snack due to all the food we had eaten at the Eagle Tavern. Monika crocheted and played solitaire with 2 decks while I downloaded pictures and worked on the journal. We also planned for the drive home, but found we were of two minds about it. The Pennsylvania Turnpike route had relatively mild grades but involves twisty sections with lanes narrowed by construction. The National Pike through northern Maryland had no toll and was a more modern road with no tunnel, but it also had quite steep grades in many sections. We mulled over both options for a while but neither route seemed ideal for towing the trailer, so we slept on it.