Great Lakes Road Trip Day 1 Part 2; San Francisco to Detroit

Eventually after sitting at the airport in San Francisco for a good solid three and half hours I did get underway towards Detroit.

At first I thought the flight path was going to head directly over CA 108 via Sonora Pass given that I could see the city of Sonora below in the Sierra Foothills. Sonora is the location of CA 108 and CA 49:

Instead the flight path basically took a direct shot east via Yosemite National Park and the Tioga Pass Road:

Before exiting California Nevada the flight took a pass over Mono Lake which is traversed on three sides by; US 395, CA 167, and CA 120:

My flight path followed US 6 through the state of Nevada which meant passing some notable features like the White Mountain Range just over the state line and the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Tonopah:

Entering Utah the flight path followed mostly I-70 which allowed decent views of three National Parks starting with Capitol Reef and the Water Pocket Ford:

The Canyonlands via the Green River:

Along with Arches with US 191 seen traversing the Moab Fault:

Unfortunately there was heavy cloud cover over the Rockies and in particular the Front Range which prevented much from being seen that was noteworthy. Really there wasn't much worth looking at out the window until downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan:

My destination was at Metro Airport in the old terminal building which has had a surprisingly nice remodel since I've visited last. I saw the traffic was bad on I-96 and I-275 so I decided to try US 23 to Brighton instead. US 23 was actually undergoing heavy construction due to a lane expansion project from Ann Arbor to I-96. The US 23 freeway was way busier than I remember it but it has probably been at least 2001 since I've used it to go through Ann Arbor.

Comments

Nick said…

To clarify, you didn't fly into a remodeled terminal in Detroit; it was the new North Terminal that was built in 2008 (assuming you flew on a non-Delta flight). The old terminals (Smith, Berry, and Davey) are no longer used for passengers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Metropolitan_Airport#North_Terminal

9:03 AM

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog