Midwest Guest

Passports with Purpose drive to build school launches today

Travel bloggers demonstrated the reach and potential of harnessing blogging and social media to help others with the successful Passports with Purpose last year, tackling the even more ambitious goal of building a school with the launch the second annual Passports with Purpose drive today.

Passports with Purpose founders and travel bloggers Beth Whitman, Debbie Dubrow, Michelle Duffy, and Pam Mandel, inspired by the success of other blogging groups to raise money for worthy causes, launched Passports with Purpose in late 2008. The group raised $7400 last year, with very little lead time or advance planning, to benefit Heifer International.

This year, the philanthropic quartet chose American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC) as the 2009 Passports with Purpose beneficiary.  The AAfC is an independent and non-profit organization dedicated to improving opportunities for the youth and rural poor in Cambodia.

Passports with Purpose co-founder, Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby, visited Cambodia and says that rebuilding the country's economy and intellectual society destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s remains a strong desire among Cambodians, but limited resources to do so in rural Cambodia make those goals ever elusive. Lacking access to education, children in rural area are at risk of falling prey to poverty or becoming victims of sex trafficking.

American journalist Bernie Krisher founded AAfC in 1993, and the group lists the construction of more than 400 primary and secondary schools in rural Cambodia as one of its major accomplishments.

Those familiar with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof may know of his personal effort to build a school through AAfC.

AAfC has a donor pledged to foot half the cost of building a school, and this year's Passports with Purpose fundraiser aims to raise the $13,000 necessary to complete the project through raffling some great prizes at the Passports with Purpose site.

Check out the Passports with Purpose Web site for more information about the group and how you can help.

Select the prizes you'd love to win, and go to the Passports with Purpose link to make your donation. For each ten dollar donation you make between now and December 21, Passports with Purpose enters you into the raffle for your prize of choice. Note as you bid for prizes that shipping restrictions, terms, and blackout dates might apply in some cases.

One hundred percent of the donations go directly to AAfC, a 501 (c)(3) charity.

Passports with Purpose will announce the prize winners on January 5, 2010.

Meanwhile, you can keep track of Passport with Purpose's progress toward the goal of building a school by checking out the widget on the right-hand side of my blog, or visit the Passports with Purpose site.

Last year's prize list included some pretty fabulous items--many things that would make a great gift for someone on your list, even as you help give the gift of a brighter future to children whose prospects are dim without the resources to become educated and build better lives for themselves.

Help the travel blogging community help others, any maybe find some great travel blogs you'll continue to enjoy year round in the process!

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

New at the Urbane Life

Check out some of my latest articles at The Urbane Life:

Explore global diversity through film, music, dance and performance art in Dearborn-Visit the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI, during  December for their three-day Arab Film Festival and a Latin-flavored music and dance installment of the museum's ongoing Global Thursdays series

Buy Local: Oakland Community College Potters Market creates showcase for local artists-Check out the work of over 130 local potters at this annual marketplace presented by students and alumni of OCC's well regarded Ceramic Technology program.

Motown memories tell a tale of empowerment and Detroit pride-Visit the Motown Museum (a.k.a. "Hitsville U.S.A.") as the label wraps up its fiftieth anniversary year.

Buy Local: The 3/50 project shows how to get the biggest bang for your buck-Invest in your community by supporting local businesses--where $68 of every $100 spent returns to your local community in the form of taxes, payroll and other spending.

The Urbane Life is a community blog for Urbane Apartments, a growing group of apartment buildings, luxury lofts and condos in metropolitan Detroit.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: Time for Santa Bear to come out of hibernation

I really don't like seeing Christmas decorations or hearing Christmas music before the day after Thanksgiving, and commercial interests seem to want to move Christmas up earlier and earlier each year.  I always feel like Thanksgiving gets short shrift, and these days, the most commercialized version of Christmas seems to be even encroaching on Halloween!

As you can see, I love my Santa Bears and Christmas tree...and today I think it's finally fair to rouse the bears from their hibernation start thinking about hauling my decorations up from their basement hidey hole.

We've bought a lot of ornaments as we've traveled over the years, so decorating the tree always brings back some of our favorite travel memories.

Whatever holidays you celebrate this season, this year more than ever, I wish you the best of times and look forward to sharing your holiday traditions as well!

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Happy Thanksgiving!

I look forward to settling down in front of the television with a little breakfast and watching the holiday parades. Hopefully I'll spot my favorite Muppet, Grover, as I did several Thanksgivings ago when watching the televised parades.

We're not big football fans (we live in the Detroit area--'nuff said!), so we'll look forward to watching some Plymouth Whalers hockey on Saturday.

Thanksgiving is always a little bittersweet because it pretty much signals the end of autumn and a lot of the beautiful fresh veggies at the farmers markets--but it's always the real harbinger of the winter holiday season for me as well.

Here's hoping you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

© Dominique King All rights reserved

"Top Chef Master" Rick Bayless cooks with confidence in Chicago

I'm a huge fan of "Top Chef", and I loved the "Top Chef Masters" spinoff where 24 well-known chefs competed against each other to win $100,000 for the charity of their choice.

I went to the big BlogHer conference in Chicago just as the initial rounds of "Top Chef Masters" ended and the championship round was set to begin.

Renowned Chicago restaurateur and southwestern cuisine master, Rick Bayless, made it through the initial competition and was set to compete in "Top Chef Masters" finals as I attended BlogHer. I enjoyed watching Bayless compete, admiring his food and the fact that he seemed like a pretty down-to-earth guy.

Mise en place shot in overhead mirror

We've tried, and failed, to get into Bayless' insanely popular Topolobampo and Frontera Grill restaurants the last two times we've visited Chicago. Apparently, you have to make reservations at least a couple of weeks in advance, and we just haven't had that sort of in-advance planning time when we've visited the city.

So, it was fun to spot Bayless in the BlogHer exhibition hall--giving a cooking demonstration!

Bayless was at the National Pork Board booth, so he opted to do a fairly simple dish of pork tenderloin dressed with a chile-mango chutney.

It was fun seeing Bayless work in a relatively casual setting and finally get to taste at least a little bite of his food!

I also enjoyed seeing him win the finale of "Top Chef Masters" after coming home in August. Bayless smartly stuck with the southwestern cuisine he knows so well during the competition. His final meal for the show included a mole sauce that seemed to particularly wow the judges.

Now, if only I could get back to Chicago and enjoy some of the mole sauce myself!  

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: Photowalk in Royal Oak, Michigan

I went on my first Photowalk last Sunday and thought I'd share a few photos I took around my home town that day.

City Hall

City Hall Plaza

 

The mission that day was to meet up with a dozen or so other folks to walk around town, make some images, and compare notes over a late lunch at the local brew pub. The mood was relaxed and encouraging as our crew included people of varying photography experience and cameras that included everything from point-and-shoots to high-end consumer or pro DSLR cameras. I even had my new Flip video cam in my pocket and shot a couple minutes of video (although I've got a way to go before I master shooting and editing video to post!).

Rear door at Stagecrafters community theater

 

The fun for me was meeting a lot of folks (some for the first time) that I'd "met" on Twitter and playing tourist in my hometown. Organizers Dave Peckens and Becks Davis already posted some nice accounts of our expedition, so I'll just take this opportunity to show off my hometown.

View of downtown Royal Oak from roof at Urbane Apartments

Up on the roof

 

Want to check out other photos from that day? Visit my Flickr photostream or the Detroit Photowalks Flickr photostream.

 

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© 2009 Dominique King All rights reserved

Art Institute of Chicago expansion makes "second city" museum the nation's second largest

I'm always fascinated to see how museums manage to combine art and architecture spanning several different eras and styles, and I wondered if the Chicago museum's new modern wing would live up to the glowing reports I'd read online.

I managed to visit the museum during a free-admission Thursday evening earlier this summer, just a couple of months after the expansion's grand opening in late May. Even as the new wing's expansive three-story Griffin Court was packed with people that evening, I could still experience it as the extension of neighboring outdoor Millennium Park as architect Renzo Piano intended.

The extension reminded me a bit of the expansion and addition of a modern wing at the University of Michigan's Museum of Art (UMMA) that I wrote about here last spring, where a modern addition to the museum's original Beaux Arts style building nearly doubled UMMA's space to 90,000-plus square feet and opened to ecstatic reviews from visitors and the local press.

The Art Institute of Chicago is a much larger building. Its modern wing measures 264,000 square feet, and the expansion brings the art museum's total floor space to an astounding one million square feet!

Visitors benefit by now being able to see about 15 percent of the museum's modern art (1945-present) collection, compared to only the only 10 percent of that collection the museum previously could display. Moving the 20th and 21st century art into the new wing also frees up space elsewhere previously housing the modern pieces for other parts of the collection.

The big project had a big price tag. The new wing cost $300 million, with another $110 million spent on other improvements like renovated galleries in the original building.

The hefty price tag, and an accompanying hike in Art Institute of Chicago admission from $12 to $18, drew some criticism. Museum officials point out that special exhibitions are now included in the price of regular admission, and several public spaces within the museum remain open to visitors free of charge. They also say that increased attendance and memberships generated the new wing helped keep the number of staff layoffs lower than they probably would have been without the museum's increased revenue.

I liked the expansive feeling of the new wing, much as I admired the spacious new areas at the UMMA. And, like many other modern art museums I've visited, I ended up enthralled more by the architecture of the building than the art in the galleries.

I loved Chicago's modern wing features like floor to ceiling windows framing great downtown views, blades covering the windows to reflect the most destructive light from bearing down on the collection, and a suspended staircase described by one journalist as "Meisian" (for the famous German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who lived and worked in Chicago after leaving Germany's Bauhaus school when Nazis closed it in the 1930s).

Galleries on the three floors populating perimeter of the Griffin Court provide plenty of space for work from different schools and eras of modern art, and the somewhat sterile look of stark white walls serve to set nicely set off much of the collection.

The art? Well, I've often struggled to understand modern art.

We even took an "understanding modern art" class at our local Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center in an effort to wrap our minds around some of the seemingly random and crazy things we saw in modern art galleries. The class helped us understand a bit of the history and development behind modern art, but I've got to admit that some pieces still have me scratching my head and wondering about what I'm seeing.

I liked what I saw of the modern wing during my visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, though. It will be interesting to see if the public continues to support the museum in increased numbers and revenue as the novelty of the new spaces wear off.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Chicago

Pennsylvania's Presque Isle Pierhead Lighthouse unique among U.S. lights

Many travelers may be familiar with the iconic Presque Isle Lighthouse pictured on special Pennsylvania license plates, but Presque Isle's unique pierhead light is also worth visiting.

We drove a few miles farther along the peninsula after visiting the Presque Isle Lighthouse to the road turning off towards a Coast Guard base at the southeastern tip of Presque Isle, where a pierhead light marks the narrow entrance into the protected harbor between the city of Erie on the mainland and the long bar of Presque Isle jutting out into Lake Erie.

The pier was a popular place for fishers the day we visited, and we saw at least one angler pull in a sizeable fish as we strolled along the concrete pier out to the light.

The city of Erie already had a land lighthouse, built in 1818, but difficulty navigating into the inlet brought a beacon at the harbor entrance in 1830, housed in a small wooden light tower.

Mariners sometimes had difficulty spotting the pier light until they were right by it, and the pier light got a new sixth-order Fresnel lens in the mid-1850s. The lighthouse and improved lighting didn't help much when a schooner attempting to enter the harbor in 1857 during a storm collided with the lighthouse, destroying the tower and the lens.

A temporary light hung on a gallows frame at the pier until a new pier light tower went up in 1858.

Perhaps officials had the fate of the original pier light tower in mind when they ordered a cast-iron tower sheathed in steel for an estimated cost of $5,250.

The 34-tall Presque Isle Pierhead Light (or Erie Harbor North Pierhead Light) tower is unique among lighthouses in the United States, being the only surviving example of the square and pyramidal style light tower in the country.

Changes at the harbor over the years meant changes for the little pierhead light as traffic increased in the harbor, necessitating changes in its pier perch.

A major change came in 1882 for the lighthouse with a move 190 feet further along the pier. Another move of 509 feet along further the pier and automation of the light happened in 1940.

The home that housed a number of the light's 15 keepers through 1940 still sits on the grounds of the nearby Coast Guard Station.

In 1995, the Coast Guard changed the tower's fixed red light to a red flashing light. The lighthouse's fourth-order Fresnel lens also went to the Erie Maritime Museum at that time. The pierhead tower with its solar powered light is still an active navigational aid for area sailors.

Erie has a rich maritime history (much of it beyond the scope of my lighthouse articles). Readers interested in learning more might want to start by checking out the Erie Maritime Museum Web site, especially the page recounting the story of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and his victory over the British in 1813 during the Battle of Lake Erie and the War of 1812.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Erie

Photo Friday: Grand Teton sunset

Browsing through my photo files, I realized there are a lot of great photos I might not normally post here because I primarily write stories about the Midwest.

However, I thought it might be fun to mix things up a bit by sharing this sunset photo I took a couple of years ago when we traveled west to Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, Wyoming.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Pennsylvania's Presque Isle Lighthouse, one of Lake Erie's first lights

We recently hopped over the state line from Ohio into Pennsylvania and the city of Erie to check out the state park and lighthouses on Presque Isle and learn about Erie's importance in Great Lakes maritime history.

The Presque Isle Lighthouse sits on a beautiful Lake Erie beach, and its square tower makes it a little different from a lot of the round-tower lighthouses I've seen along the Great Lakes primarily in Michigan and Ohio.

French soldiers controlled the area in the 1700s as a strategic military location and named the six-mile-long peninsula, jutting out into Lake Erie, Presque Isle (French for "almost an island"). The British gained control of Erie during the French and Indian War in 1760, and it became part of the state of Pennsylvania in 1792 after the American Revolution.

Erie holds the distinction as being the site one of the first U.S. lighthouses on the Great Lakes, with a tower built on the mainland in 1818 (Buffalo, New York, also established a lighthouse in 1818). Erie gained importance as a shipping port, especially with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1824 and subsequent extensions of the shipping canal network connecting the eastern United States to the western frontier.

Swampy terrain presented problems, and a layer of quicksand far below the original lighthouse caused it to sink into the ground. A sandstone tower replaced the original light in 1867 (deactivated in 1899). Visitors can view the exterior of this tower in a city park, although we weren't able to get there this trip.

Our travels this time took us out along the scenic drive in Presque Isle State Park to visit the Presque Isle Lighthouse.

Placing a lighthouse on the peninsula made sense because it would help mariners safely navigate past the spit of land on an otherwise fairly straight coastline.

Construction began in 1872, but the area terrain again challenged builders.

A scow loaded with 6,000 bricks bound for the construction site was lost at sea. Washouts were another concern with the ever-present threat of separation from the mainland during storms.

Workers constructed a crude road through the swamp between the lighthouse site and the mainland, a road later planked with boards to help make it more passable, and eventually paved with concrete in 1925. That path exists today as a short hiking trail.

Workers completed the lighthouse, at a cost of $15,000, in 1873.

Today Presque Isle is near Erie's busy downtown, but the Presque Isle Lighthouse's first keeper, Charles Waldo, characterized the location as "the loneliest place on earth".

The original 40-foot tower had five layers of brick, to help it withstand the frequent storms, and housed a whale oil light. Workers increased the tower's height to 57 feet in 1896 to increase the light's range, and painted it white in 1898 to increase daytime visibility.

Other changes over the years included: electrification of the light in 1924, construction of a peninsula road in 1927, and automation of the light in 1962. The lighthouse earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources took over ownership of the lighthouse in 1998, and the lighthouse with its keepers' dwelling serves as a private residence for Presque Isle State Park management.

Be on the lookout as you drive through the area for special Pennsylvania license plates that picture the Presque Isle Lighthouse, with much of the money generated by sales going to lighthouse preservation and promoting maritime history in Pennsylvania.

I wish we could have climbed the 70-plus iron stairs to the top of the tower, but the lighthouse only rarely opens for public tours. You can see the lighthouse from the park road, or park along the road to take a short walk around the lighthouse and down to the Lake Erie beach for the best views of the tower.

© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Erie