Varied Year End Travel Stops: Detroit, Chicago, Colorado Springs
My 2021 travel year closed out with a trio of coin collecting destinations spread over six weeks in November and early December. First up was an outing to Colorado Springs to attend the new ANA board’s “On-Boarding” session that closed out the first week of November, with a drive down to Chicago to attend and address the Chicago Coin Club’s 102nd anniversary annual banquet closing out the sequence. Those two occasions were wrapped around a flight to Detroit to attend the 65th fall convention of the Michigan State Numismatic Society over Thanksgiving weekend.
My traditional Thanksgiving weekend travels to the Detroit area to attend the MSNS convention in Warren got under way on Thursday morning as usual. This tradition was uninterrupted at the Hyatt Recency in Dearborn from 1976 through 2011, with the event being moved to the Sports and Convocation Center on the Macomb Community College campus in Warren in 2012. With Dearborn being convenient to the airport, but Warren being remotely situated, since the move my annual travels had been by car.
Joining me on the annual drive, from 2016 through 2019, had been ex-son-in-law Randy Thern. Last year was a no-go for the MSNS event due to the COVID-19 pandemic upheaval. This year we opted to return our travels to the airways. It was about 8:30 a.m., with light snow trickling down, when I fired up the Audi, picking Randy up in Waupaca, Wis., a few minutes later, with a 48-mile drive delivering us to the Appleton airport an hour later. Our scheduled 11:10 a.m. Delta Connection flight, a regional jet with a light passenger load of around 20, arrived at the Detroit airport at 1:20 p.m. as scheduled.
