Day Forty-Three: Cleveland Rocks
One of the prevailing reasons we felt that we could manage this trip over the summer was that this time of year is typically pretty slow for business. If the economy was lagging in April…it sure as heck wasn’t going to pick up too much steam in July when the universe is on holiday anyway.
Now that fact is starting to hit us on the road.
Because as much as I love the concept of the “unplan”…being willing to accept and learn from obstacles….sometimes it’s incredibely annoying.
I had planned to meet people in Pittsburgh yesterday. Those plans fell through.
Then we attempted to catch up with someone who was referred to us in Cleveland.
No dice.
Summer vacations are getting squeezed in now at an incredible rate and finding schedules late in the week that are open turn out to be more difficult these days. And my frustration with the weekend in general…which totally gets in the way of meeting new people…has extended beyond Saturday and Sunday to include also Thurs, Fri and sometimes Monday.
So while we enjoyed our brief stint in this lakeside city in northern Ohio, I can’t say it’s exactly the way I had wanted things to go.
But I’m not going to let that get the way of learning something from this place that wasn’t already made evident by Ian Hunter and Drew Carey.
So here’s the impression this town gives to a person who’s never been here and knows nothing about it….
Lake Erie is big.
Profound, right? I mean, how can you know a place without meeting any of its people? We didn’t even get out of the car to check out the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. But Lake Erie is really freakin’ big. Even though it’s one of the smallest of the great lakes.
So we press on. To Chi-Town.
Like most people planning a trip to Chicago, our first step is to scope out a good place to camp. OK….maybe not exactly in the city. I think that kind of camping is called “homelessness” and as adventurous as we are, we aren’t quite ready to go there yet.
Instead we took inspiration from Cleveland’s “Great Lake” and in a combination of nostalgia for years spent in at the YMCA camp in Michigan and a truly superficial but still important desire to add one more state to our list, we left Cleveland for Great Dunes State Park in southwest MI, otherwise known as “State 19″.
Tomorrow we are actually meeting someone in Chicago who was willing to find time on a SATURDAY. Finally, someone else whose days all bleed together. Or at least, whose willing to accept that mine do
