General Discussion

My German-based daughter lives near there, and I frequently have brief work assignments there. It is also a convenient alternative (counter-intuitive, I know) airport for me in case flights from/to Düsseldorf are either not running, or poorly timed for my needs. Lufthans has figured out that it's environmentally bad to run big airliners for the 30 minute hop from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt, but immenseliy smart to "rent out" a contingent of seats on the hourly trains that leave from right under the Frankfurt airport to Düsseldorf, and they only take 90 minutes to get there. My daughter lives in Königstein, a very picturesque (almost touristy) town about half an hour outside of Frankfurt in the Taunus hills. The Frankfurt Airport is about halfway between downtown and where she lives, so she is never far from where she has to go. She is about a two hour drive from us, but it is treacherous in the winter, with a third of the way through narrow winding hilly roads that ice over, and the rest on houge stretches of Autobahn, where trucks from the formoer socialist countries will mash your car to an accordion if you aren't careful. Those places are loose with their work rules, and have single over-tired drivers making the run from Warsaw/Prague/Budapest/Bucharest/Sofia/Tirana etc to the ports of Rotterdam and/or Antwerp. They have to transit through Germany to get there, and they just fall asleep at the wheel.

Düsseldorf, being one of the two major "lower Rhein" twin cities (Köln is thr other), is known both for being a big financial center for the Ruhr Valley conglomerates, as well a big fashoin center and a big party town. It has stretches of cafés and small restaurants along the banks of the Rhein (Rheinpromenade) and they are adjacent to the old town with its narrow streets and old buildings. Bombing flattened them during the war, but after the war, the whole old town was faithfully rebuilt from photos, and they used as much old material as they could salvage--did a credible job, too.

As for Part 2, I have to confess my ignorance about the whole Great Lakes region. As it was part of my Dad's Washington "beat" when he was an active journalist stationed there, I should be careful about admitting that. His main paper was a one-horse town in upstate New York on the St. Lawrence Seaway, which meant he has to know ALL Senators, Congresspeople and Governors from the Great Lakes states very well. He was such a regular at the Canadian Embassy that he organized a weekly breakfast with the Canadian Ambassador and other DC jourlanists covering the region, and the group still bears his name. Former Ambassador Raymond Chrétien remains a friend of mine from those days. If you look at the list of important Americans from those states over the past 50 years, you get an idea why he knew everybody in DC. Proxmire from Wisconsin, Humührey and Mondale from Minnesota, Phil Hart and Gerry Ford from Michigan, Hugh Scott from Pennsylvania, and "take-yer-pick" from New York. But me? I rarely got up there, so Saint Clair Shores Michigan is someplace I know less about than Mahé and Praslin. I have to plead shameful ignorance there.