Maine Bumpkins in the Big City

Eternal Life Sculpture

6 July 2012

Stats for the day:  Same as yesterday, no travel

Our gracious hosts, John and Laura, set us up with a great day of relaxation and sight seeing today.  Their help last night with the tour, and vast knowledge of the city made it easy for us to use the public transportation to go into downtown Cleveland, do a self-guided walking tour, have lunch at a wonderful brewery and pub, make it to the huge market place to get the fixings for supper, and get back to their place without once getting lost.  Not a bad trick for a couple of overwhelmed country folk.

We did manage to sleep in this morning, 8:30 is late for us.  We took some time to update yesterday's posts and then planned our day.  Before heading downtown, Rick checked the bike and found. . . yes you guessed it, another broken spoke.  It must have happened when we hit the pothole with all the water in it.  We missed most of them, but got sucked into that one.  Anyway, Nola called John and he got in touch with a friend, Josh, from a local bike shop who has agreed to make a house call and fix the spoke for us.  Rick is making dinner for everyone tonight as a thank you for all the wonderful generosity and friendship we have experienced here in Ohio, and Cleveland especially.

Soldiers & Sailors Monument

One of many on the streets

The trip downtown was amazing.  It is quite a beautiful city, with various forms of architecture, loads of public art, parks and fountains; you name it, they have it.  We can only post so many of our multitude of pictures from today, but don't worry, we will make up a PowerPoint slide show to display when we get home.  We can see everyone looking at the their watch going, "Oh my, time for us to go. Sorry." 

Some of the most memorable sites were the Soldiers and Sailors monument, the Hard Rock Cafe, and the various forms of art placed all around the city.  Because the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is here in Cleveland, there are large, beautifully decorated guitars all along the streets and in the parks.  The imagination that went into all of the designs is magnificent.  We had a blast just catching sight of them as we did our tour. 

The West End Market was simply overwhelming.  The shear size of the buildings and the number of vendors was staggering.  One could spend many hours of just browsing trying to decide what to get and where.  We managed to focus and get what we needed for dinner tonight before getting burned out by the options, and made it to the bus just in the nick of time to make the ride back to the house. 

Of course, we did this all in 90+ degree heat.  John came home this afternoon and said he saw a digital thermometer reading on his drive that read 101 degrees.  Now that is some tough heat. 

It will be back on the road tomorrow for us as we head towards New London, OH.  Looks to be about a 60 or so mile day.  Check back when you can to see if the heat breaks around here or not.