If you’re in Detroit and need/want to go to Canada, there are only two ways (unless you’re driving a train)
You can cross over the water using the Ambassador bridge that was built in 1929 or you can go under the water using the Detroit Windsor tunnel, built in 1930
With the explosion of commerce between the US and Canada, these two routes have become a real bottleneck. Your only other option is to go up to Port Huron to the North and cross a bridge to Sarnia.
The private owner of the tunnel has just declared bankruptcy, citing a decrease in traffic. Despite the tunnel being 83 years old and it’s construction costs long ago paid off and no major expenditures like adding a second tunnel, the owners sucked out $830 million using the tunnel as collateral and now can’t pay the bonds.
I’ve never driven through the tunnel – among the people I knew in the area in the 1980s, the main purpose of the tunnel was to go to Windsor on the weekends and go to the strip clubs and get drunk.
For a couple years now, you need a passport to return to the United States from Canada – your Michigan Driver’s license is no longer enough. Damn terrorists stopping us drunk Americans from seeing Canadian boobs! What is this country coming to?
Ontario’s legal drinking age is 19, so that causes many 18, 19 and 20 year olds to cross and drink without fear of being arrested, perhaps at a strip club, but perhaps at just a regular restaurant.
My understanding is that in many US communities, topless clubs are legal but not nude clubs… the entertainers must wear pants/panties of some sort to avoid the obscenity crime. My understanding was that Ontario did not consider nudity a crime, so I did a quick Google and found a long list of “nude” (and some “topless”) entertainment businesses in Windsor.
Don’t forget to take your passport.
I believe there may now also be a casino in Windsor too. You can gamble on whether the USD or CDN is worth more by the time you get back to Detroit. “Jason’s” was the hot spot in the 1980s.
Oddly, Windsor seems to not have the crime and economic malaise of Detroit.
The traffic in the other direction is Canadians coming to the US to buy cheaper gasoline, cigarettes (probably no longer true) and booze – and going to suburban Detroit hospitals like Beaumont in Royal Oak to get medical tests and procedures the socialized medicine in Canada couldn’t provide in a timely manner
“Oddly, Windsor seems to not have the crime and economic malaise of Detroit” – just shows you Detroit didn’t get sick from the weather.
Look at the Caribbean island countries- they have wildly different standards of living and are only 50 miles apart. The difference isn’t natural resources or weather – it is government.
Jason’s was sold about 5 years ago and now has male strippers. It’s literally a block from the tunnel exit
http://www.canada.com/story.html?id=e94c10eb-cbc2-404e-9593-c58b8f209585
Check out the girlie show from the Vermont State Fair (all the pics are rated G and each is worth a look – rare color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-501465_162-10011709-59.html
-“Detroit hospitals like Beaumont in Royal Oak to get medical tests and procedures the socialized medicine in Canada couldn’t provide in a timely manner”
Don’t know why, items you buy in Canada is like 15% sales tax ! They should be rolling in the cash for medical services. Wonder if they have WIC ?
In Virginia they have school lunch for kids during the summer months for .25 cents and adults can eat with them for $2 . What a deal, volunteers serve it. It was on the local news.
They didn’t have that when I was in school. My parents made sure we had tomato’s for a tomato sandwich and bologna, mayo or mustard and fresh bread for a ‘west virginia ham sandwich’ during the summer for me and my brother when we were growing up. Turned out ok.
I guess
Parrott
I didn’t explain it fully – need an MRI in Canada? Take a number and be dead before you have the test. Cross the border, pay cash to an American hospital, get the test same day.
I think in some cases Canada may pay part of the costs – not sure. Same is true in Florida – Canadians and Europeans with cash get fast turnaround on medical procedures. What will they do once Obama creates shortages?
Ed schultz can eat my shorts ! He has acts like he’s insane.
parrott