We’re still in Detroit!
We’ve got reservations for an awesome steak-house tonight.
If you haven’t been to Detroit lately, it’s REALLY turned itself around. Every time we come here, there’s always an impressive amount of improvement we can see from the last time. Tons of construction, new businesses, and people everywhere. It ain’t the ghost-town it was 15 or 20 years ago.
We noticed that too. We were quite impressed. I guess this as as good an opportunity to post my review of the trip.
We drove down Saturday morning to a hotel in Livonia, MI. It's a suburb of Detroit as far as I can tell. We got settled in then started heading to Ford Field. We pre-booked parking so did gps to that address. It went smoothly until we got off 75 to 375 and then to some street the GPS called Chrysler Drive but was actually known as Jefferson Avenue. Traffic at stand still that is when my son noticed that we were right beside Ford Field. Anyway after some cursing at the GPS we made it to our parking spot. We had a 700m walk to Ford Field. We were impressed with the downtown. There were lots of people there as there had been a Tigers game that afternoon (a Tigers victory) and apparently the baseball stadium is right next to the football stadium (it didn't used to be). Had circumstances been different, we would have come in yesterday evening and gone to the Tigers game and then just walked over to Ford Field.
We walked the 700m and were impressed at how Ford Field was decorated. It definitely had stuff for the Lions all around but they put a banner around it advertising SummerSlam. Looked impressive. There was a huge line to get into the stadium but also a non-line mass crowd moving towards. We chose to follow the crowd thinking these were floor entrance people in line. They weren't. There were about 20 metal detectors at gate A and that line was for one of them. The other 19 had almost no line and they were trying to get people out of that line into them, but people are sheep. We walked right in. Once in the door they scanned our ticket and our seats were right there. Worked out perfectly.
We were very impressed with Ford Field as a SumerSlam venue and a football stadium. Great sightlines. Had trouble finding the Lion's SuperBowl banners. But it was a good stadium. It would be a great place for professional football should a professional football team ever make it to Detroit.
The crowd was lively but well behaved and surprisingly polite. When they played the ads for Wrestlemania in Philadelphia, the crowd booed very loudly. I would never have thought Detroit would have a rivalry of any sort with Philly.
The show as amazing. We liked almost every match. The stories (yes stories -- it is a drama we are watching) were really good. The only match that sucked was Bazler vs Ronda Rowdy. They had it set for "MMA rules" but instead of letting it be an MMA fight they left it scripted and the result was a boring match with the 2 combatants trying to choke each other over and over and over (the difference in the rules is MMA has no count outs or pins to count of 3 -- has to be knockout or submission).
I would be happy to discuss any other matches if anybody actually follows the story lines.
After the show we along with 60K other fans made it out to the streets of Detroit. The cops were out doing traffic control and we got out of the core in about 1 hour (45 minutes was in a line in the parking lot). We saw an LRT/monorail type train go by on an elevated track. It was all decked out in SummerSlam advertisements. We are pretty sure it doesn't go as far as our hotel as it would have been an alternate means of transport.
We had Bob Evans for breakfast this morning and drove back safely. A good weekend. And I don't think of Detroit in the same light anymore.