We started with breakfast at Grumpy’s Cafe which was on the “we don’t give people straws” train. Their bathroom had a large display on how eschewing straws would save civilization and that it was a sign of Western decadence or something. Great. Not having a straw cuts down my ability to consume the normal 9 liters of diet cola I like with a meal so they may have had ulterior motives. After breakfast, we parted with our hosts and continued to Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland is a rustbelt town that has far more culture than its current population would otherwise need which is to say the museums are pleasantly devoid of people. Outside the Cleveland Museum of Art is a Rodin that someone tried to “vandalize” by planting explosives at its base. The  vandal succeeded in damaging a foot.  The club-footed copy of The Thinker is easily my favorite version now. I consider it a meditation on how unflappable the properly intrigued or oblivious can be.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a fair amount of American art from the colonial period to early modern. The thread of America becoming America was undeniable albeit through a specific White Anglo-Saxon lens. I hope that’s a chain of progress we get to add a few more links to. The Cleveland Museum of Art was also hosting Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors which started…the day after we left. This marks the fourth time I’ve managed to not get tickets, arrive right before, or arrive right after the exhibit has started. I should probably go to the Mattress Factory. The collection of Dutch art is impressive and I’m not sure why. I wonder if there’s a kinship across times between two cultures who at their peak had thriving middle classes. I hope Cleveland does again.

The rest of the collection is top notch and even better when you consider it’s less than its peak population in 1950 (390K from over 900K). The dividends of concentration are the shows of industrial wealth we call centers for the arts. I know of no such analog coming from the as-rich-per-person-on-average splotches of the suburbs. I’d gladly give up a lawn to have access to Leger and Picasso. Cleveland architecture is distinct and borrows from Beaux-Arts and Art Deco through more contemporary styles and each building does a good job of fitting. The square around the art museum is a well arranged but quirky dinner party.

We departed Cleveland and stopped at a strongly endorsed bakery near Oberlin College. Eh. Off to Detroit. Our hosts met us there with slightly-fancier-than-they-normally-have wine in a box and we caught up. The evening ended on an air mattress and its gradual deflation. Another not-quite-working air mattress.

This post was made on 2018-07-26 and is backdated.

We left Philadelphia at close to 6am which marked the first time I’d met my target departure time in some number of road trips. The drive to Cuyahoga Valley Nation Park was uneventful to the point that the Lebanese restaurant we hit for lunch proved to be a chain. The visitor center sold National Park passes and I purchased one. $80 for one year of unlimited access to the National Park system is usually a good deal. Buying one involved a locked box that contained a safe that contained another locked box. This seemed a bit much. Cuyahoga Falls was in the high 80s with humidity in the 90s. The short 4 mile hike we took was enough to leave us both a special kind of parched. My travel partner commented after a few minutes in the car that I was dry already when in reality I had merely soaked through my shirt to a uniform sweat stain. We got caught in a downpour which may have reduced how wet I was.  After the storm passed, we continued on to Cleveland.

We continued on to Cleveland and met our hosts at a grilled cheese place with an expansive definition of “topping”. The menu had a few oddities to it in that one could add an egg for relatively little and also have waffles added cheaply. The server was almost comically chipper. Like beyond “help, they’re holding me captive” smiley and closer to “I love Big Brother” chipper. We moved on to the Cleveland Waterfront after visiting the “FREE” stamp. The Waterfront consisted of a dock on Lake Erie. I am dimly aware that Cleveland has things. I’m not entirely sure what, but the Waterfront wasn’t too encouraging. Despite being archetypal of “Rust Belt” Cleveland contains both a few large firms as well as Case Western Reserve. The downside is that these industries rarely have coat tails that pull up other businesses and I’m unsure of how the hand has been played by the city. After seeing a boat titled the Aluminauti and supermanning through the Cleveland sign we turned in. At this point, we were seven hours from home. Not quite a road trip. Getting there.

Part of the trip was catching up with my Cleveland host. He’s someone I’ve know for more than 20 years at this point and he’s on the cusp of marriage. He has a passion for film where passion may not be the right word. He consumes film without pretense, and while I’m confident he can tell me why Orson Welles is so great he’s never really pushed it on me. He has strongly recommended I consume more films. His house is a bit of a cathedral to media which would have confused me up until I started buying vinyl. There’s something fetishistic about discs contain culture that I’m starting to understand.

This post was made on 2018-07-26 and is backdated.