About an hour west of Detroit, Ann Arbor is most well-known for being a college town to the famous University of Michigan’s main campus. But it was also known to be an automotive industrial town in the 20th century. The red brick buildings along the former Ann Arbor Railroad tell Read more…
Corning is famed for being the home of the glassware giant that spawned Pyrex, Corelle, and the space shuttle’s windshield. It began life as a settlement by Erastus Corning in 1835 before becoming a village 13 years later. Today, Corning is the town’s largest employer with its headquarters here. Cultural Read more…
Toledo sits on the Maumee River and graces its banks with museums like Imagination Station, the National Museum of the Great Lakes, and the Toledo Museum of History. It was famous for being a glassware manufacturing hub in the 1880s. Toledo was embroiled in an internal conflict between Ohio and Read more…
There are many reasons to visit Cleveland, I wanted to see its excellent museum of art, the quirky women’s air and space museum, and its Art Deco buildings. Yes, Art Deco buildings. If you really want to see relics of the roaring 20s, and the splendour of old American public Read more…
I’ve been to over half the American states, but it wasn’t until Detroit when I finally understood America. It’s industriousness. I was driving leisurely along the I-94 in a construction zone when I was passed by two trucks each carrying three columns of ladder frame chassis piled on top of Read more…
Flint. Yes, that Flint. But before it became globally famous for not having a clean drinking water supply, it was the mother of America’s early car industry until the Great Depression. The First National Bank of Flint financed the files of Chevrolet, Dort, and Monroe. Charles Nash (president of Buick Read more…
Sydney is the largest city on Cape Breton Island in the north of Nova Scotia. Its industry began from coal mining in the eighteenth century by the French, who also built the Louisbourg Fortress. The steel industry developed two centuries later and was the city’s bastion of economic activity until Read more…
The native Mi’kmaq people used the isthmus as a transit point between the Atlantic Ocean and Bras d’Or Lake (they obviously didn’t call it that thousands of years ago) as it was only a kilometre long. Their lightweight canoes could easily be carried on their shoulders and brought from the Read more…
When I planned my trip to Atlantic Canada, I didn’t think I was going to end up in Nova Scotia, I only planned as far as New Brunswick because Nova Scotia wasn’t fully open for discretionary travel yet. A couple of days before my departure date, Nova Scotia finally opened Read more…
Lunenburg is one of the oldest cities in Canada and was home to the schooner Bluenose, featured on some Canadian coinage. It is also one of only two UNESCO communities on the continent, the other one being Quebec City. It is the best conserved British-style colonial settlement on the continent Read more…