Sand, dusk, and Sandusky

That sign said Climax.

Who on earth would name a town Climax. Are we going in?

No, says Bruce, Climaxes are a dime a dozen in the US. There is another Climax in Minnesota and it has a neighbouring town called Savage and there was once a headline in the local paper, true story, which said “Savage Woman Arrested In Climax”.

So, we’re not going in.

It is a lovely day. The Michigan sky is soft blue with streaks of high cloud and some bands of frothy low cloud. The temperature is in the 80s.

We are travelling east on I94, otherwise known

as the Red Arrow Highway.

Cornfields, soy, cornfields.

We hurtle past Battle Creek, famous home of Kelloggs. I had never envisaged cornflakes as coming from an endless world of corn fields, but of course! We try to smell cornflakes cooking. Wow. Kellog has its own airport.

Down the highway is a massive casino, more or less in the middle of nowhere. The carpark is really crowded. Oh, and you can buy fireworks there, too. Hmm

Then I have a panic attack. My laptop? I don’t remember packing it. Yes, I double checked the room before leaving, but I don’t remember packing it. I can’t reach the computer case to look. I’m in a cold sweat.

Bruce takes an exit and we stop at a big servo in a place called Marshall where I see the computer safely in the bag where it is supposed to be. Phew. And Phew again.

We go into the servo shop to buy coffee and have a pee. Surprisingly, it is a massive shop full of absolutely everything - a wall of cigarettes,

liquor, groceries, snacks, dog food, toilet freshener and wines from all over the world. I grab a bottle of Kiwi Savvy for $10 and do a double-take at the sight of jumbo jars of boiled eggs in beetroot juice. America never ceases to surprise me.

The loos are another wonderful thing. Here in the somewhere nowhere at this bizarre mixed store, there are clean and well maintained toilets for customers and travellers. There are conveniences in supermarkets, too. Americans understand that people might have a call of nature while they are grocery shopping. They do not send one out into the street to look for a public loo. The loos are ubiquitous and of high standard.

Back on 94. Corn, corn, soy, corn.

Signs to 22 1/2 Mile Road. More for 26 Mile Road. Puzzling names.

Past Albion, Springport, Spring Arbor, Jackson. Corn, corn, corn, soy.

Barns are starting to reappear on the agricultural landscape. And trucks on the road.

A tall watertower tells us that the town of Sylvan is in those trees over there.

Another one announces Chelsea.

And now we are in Ann Arbor.

It is love at first sight.

This is a university town and it has all the character and vitality that goes with it. Even a shop which advertises “Insomnia Cookies. Warm. Delivered Until 3am”.

Lots of striking street art.

The streets are busy with young people.

There are lots of Indian tat shops and tie-dye gear. Bookshops and antique shops and generally quaint, interesting little businesses. I forage in a couple but am rather startled at the high prices.

We lunch in a bar-cum-restaurant, scoring a lovely pavement-side table in the shade of an umbrella. Iced tea and lettuce sandwich. Yes. My lunch was jerk chicken and prawns with water chestnut, pineapple and carrot in a dark, spiced sauce with chili sambal on the side. This, one wraps in long cos lettuce leaves and, well, it is interesting and delicious.

We check out the university. It is immense. It has 45,000 students. There are salubrious mansions for masters and sedate sorority and fraternity

houses identified by big Greek letters. Street after lawned and leafy street seem to belong to the university but its star features are its handsome old stone buildings. They are grand and glorious, built in classic Gothic, Georgian and neo-Classical styles. Stained glass. Abutments, Castellation. Carvings. Proud in the tradition of the noble old universities of England. All that is missing is cobblestone streets.

They are the jewel in the crown of lovely Ann Arbor.

Back on the road. There’s scrubby forest appearing now. We pass the exit to Saline. My online nickname. I want to go in and look. Too late. Bruce has other plans.

Signs to Milan, Toledo.

Hoarding advertising "Gluten-Free Vodka, handcrafted from grapes”. What?

Landscape opening out again to reveal more cornfields. A sort of relief overcomes me. I have become so used to them. I have been looking at them for months.

We cross the Raisin River and meet the Ohio border.

The welcome sign reminds us that this is the state of John Kasich.

And we’re warned that the Ohio Turnpike is a toll road.

Signs point to Sylvania, Toledo, Dayton...

This interstate is just mess of roadworks. We swing off onto the backroads, past Perrysburg and Luckey.

Fields and wooden houses. Lots of above-ground pools and families sitting around them sunning. Horses, barns, farms. It seems a contented landscape.

Onwards we hum and the land flattens and flattens until it could be no flatter. Of course, its flatness is covered in corn. More massive agriculture in this fertile world around those vast inland seas of Great Lakes.

We wonder what Australia might have been like had there been such great freshwater lakes in its interior.

A pleasant little town called Woodville pops up with its wide main street lined with proud, big houses. Look, it has a “Speedtrap Diner” with a police car perched on the roof. Only in America.

Fields of corn and soy. An intersection. A huge Heinz factory. Hmm. Creamed corn made here?

I look at my phone and the clock has changed by an hour. We have just moved into the Eastern Time Zone.

The landscape has not changed. It’s an endless symmetry of cornfields alternated by vast fluffy carpets of soy.

There are different sorts of corn. Some is really big. It is the real elephant’s eye variety. There is also short and stocky corn and very skinny corn. There are different stages of development, of course. The mature corn is golden-topped with its tassles. Luckily for me, I still love the look of it. I have gazed at thousands of miles of it with pleasure.

We arrive quite early in Sandusky, giving us a chance to get out and about in it and maybe even get some sun at the hotel pool.

Well, forget that. The Sandusky LaQuinta’s pool is jam-packed with happy, splashy, noisy, sunbathing, ball-tossing people. We cart our luggage into our room. It is a ground floor room. The first one we have had. It has a very pleasant aspect onto a lawned suburban parkland. It is a mini suite with a nice little living and TV section featuring a corner gas fire and a rather nice painting over the hearth. Of course, we’re in a heat wave. We turn on the fire out of curiosity for a moment but appreciate the air conditioning.

It we can’t enjoy the pool, we figure we’ll hit the beach. Sandusky is on Lake Erie,

another of the Great Lakes. Its great claim to fame is that it is the roller coaster capital of the world. Cedar Point is America’s second oldest amusement park and brags the most rides, some 71, and, I dunno, the biggest, the oldest, the weirdest roller coasters. It has 17 of them and five of them over 200 ft high. It has buildings on the history register. It has, it has, it has.

Roller coasters are not my thing, so we don’t go in.

What we are after is its mile of sandy beach.

We drive to the ticket entrance and explain our quest. We are told to park somewhere indecipherable and “walk across”.

There are parking lots after parking lots and, on the skyline, all these roller coasters.

Once parked, we can’t seem to find access to the beach. There are fences and “No Trespassing” signs to the spur of land along which runs a road to lots of beachside houses.

We are puzzled. How does one get to the beach? It is right there, but behind high cyclone fences. Huh? We cross the vast, sunburned parking lot and address a young luminous-jacketed fellow with two-way radios and illuminated traffic batons.

You drive over here and round there and then down over there and then you find a park somehow and walk through and over and you should be at the beach.

Huh?

We must look like very sweet and confused old seniors because the lad pauses and then speaks softly to us.

If you are feeling brave, there is a break in the fence where some people get through. If you feel like being adventurous.

Adventure is our middle name.

We re-cross the parking expanse under the roar of the roller coasters and the squeals of their occupants and find the far, far corner of the lot adjoining the No-Trespassing private land and we find the place in which people had pushed back the fencing and made a spot where one could squeeze around the end pole of the big cyclone fence and then clamber up over a giant mound of sand and rubble which keeps the lake from view.

And here we are.

Just the two of us.

And Lake Erie. Huge, vast, immense Lake Erie. As far as the eye can see.

Oh, and some random seagulls.

What strange and guilty pleasure. The elite privately-owned beaches were on one side of us. On the other, the beach in front of the roller coasters which continue to swoop and flip and wheel with their loads of screaming passengers.

No one is on that part of the beach. It is a security area. But far, far, far beyond, we can see where the other people have found the legit beach. Zillions of them.

And here we are, alone. Illicit. I paddle in the fresh water of the lake. Once again, it is brown and pondy in the ebbing shallow. Not like the sea. I am not mad on it. The sand is gritty and it gives underfoot. The seagulls bob around looking sceptical.

The late afternoon sunshine is warm and nourishing. We take our tops off and bask in it, watching occasional speedboats crossing the lake, watching the roller coasters and wondering at the absolute madness of people who find that sort of torture enjoyable.

Finally, as dusk descends, we have had enough. We sneak back through the broken fence, grateful to the parking boy who shared his secret access.

We don’t want to miss the Democratic Convention on CNN. This is an historic time in American history and it is as compelling as it is worrying.

The big tossup is where we will get dinner. If we are going to have Bloody Marys before dinner, we don’t want to have to drive. Bruce has already driven a lot. Time out. So it is good to be in a hotel where restaurants are within walking distance.

This is so at the LaQuinta. There is a Chinese restaurant right next door. Andy’s China Restaurant. Good old Andy.

I check out the reviews. Terrible.

How bad can it be, begs Bruce. Let’s just check it out. Look, the food photos look fine. And it’s so close. Well, against my better judgement and in an act of extreme marital compassion, I agree to order a take-away of Andy’s Chinese cuisine which we can eat while watching the convention speeches.

A couple of very unfortunate-looking people are sitting in the restaurant. Not gourmet material, I think uncharitably.

An older and a younger American woman are behind the counter trying to remember the words of a song. They are very matey. A black guy and a Chinese woman are in the kitchen. I order Hainan Chicken. Bruce orders Pepper Steak.

One is dark brown gloop and rice. The other is dark brown gloop with rice.

It does’t matter how much chili sauce I tip onto it, it is dark brown gloop which tastes like dark brown gloop.

Luckily, I like rice.

We live to tell the story.

The fact that I have no sleep is no fault of Andy’s Chinese gloop. It is that of the only bad hotel bed I’ve had on this trip.

Quite unlike the other LaQuintas.

I am glad to move on in the morning and ecstatic that we’re starting the day in the Merry-go-Round Museum.

What a wonderful thing.

It is in an old round-fronted civic building the shape of which

serendipitously hints at the idea of merry-go-round.

There is just one big old merry-go-round inside. A very old and special one with some of the most esteemed animals ever to grace a carousel. One gets a ride on it in the price of the admission ticket. I am rather glad I declined the ride because when I saw the thing going round, I was aghast at how fast it went. In the olden days, merry-go-rounds went really quite fast and it was adults who rode them. They slowed down when adapted for children. I did not know this.

English merry-go-rounds go in the opposite direction to American ones!

The reason the animals have their mouths open and look so fierce or

afeared is - wait for it - because the wood carvers found that they needed to depict the animals with their ears down and not up. They broke off too often with all the gripping and grabbing on the rides if they were erect ears. So, instead of being up-ear happy, they had to take on the expressions which went with flattened ears. And some remarkable expressions ensued.

It all adds to the sideshow fear and thrill element, the exotica of the carnival.

The museum contains an extensive history of merry-go-rounds in the USA and lots of rampant animals - all sorts from ostrich to lion, from deer to prancer. There are decorative merry-go-tround screens and cupids, myriad details of the craft and tradition of these wonderful rides.

They are in danger around the world, since they are not big profit machines. But, the manager of the museum tells me, they are still being made. So all is not lost.

On that note and to the sound of the carousel organ ringing in our ears, we bid farewell to Sandusky - a very unusual and interesting town indeed.