Observation:  Like any large city, Detroit is filled with memorials for the dead.  There are traditional cemeteries throughout with gorgeous headstones and mausoleums honoring the deceased.  But you also see many other types that are often more personal and/or unique – small murals on the side of a building or on the back of a garage with short details about this person someone loved, large murals of famous people like Aretha Franklin playing to a broader audience, and graffiti artists honoring those people close to them, often fellow artists they respect.  But the two examples that strike me harder every time are the site of dozens of identical empty alcohol bottles piled up on someone’s abandoned front porch or when tons of stuffed animals are tied to a tree in front of a home or to a fence over a highway.  Both of these displays obviously represent different ages and different situations, but they both tend to make me sad because they often represent the harder parts of a city struggling with its own demons.  A tombstone could represent someone who lived 100 years and had a full, wonderful life, but those Patron bottles or that teddy bear represent someone whose life was cut way too short.

Note: Substitute pic from a previous ride for the featured pic.

Distance:  00.00 miles (two flats, so had to start over the next morning)

D-Fact:  In 1928, the Detroit Police Department sent the first successful one-way radio link between police headquarters and cruisers in the city. Detroit Patrolman Kenneth Cox and engineering student Robert L. Batts built a stable radio receiver and antenna system that changed the speed at which the police could respond to emergencies. The Detroit Police were also the first department in the nation to dispatch patrol cars regularly by radio.