{"id":1471,"date":"2015-06-13T22:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T22:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1471"},"modified":"2018-09-07T02:45:11","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T02:45:11","slug":"saturday-june-13-cleveland-to-buffalo-niagara-falls-ca-260-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/06\/13\/saturday-june-13-cleveland-to-buffalo-niagara-falls-ca-260-miles\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, June 13 — Cleveland to Buffalo \/ Niagara Falls (ca. 260 miles)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This was an eventful day! We checked out of our somewhat marginal hotel
\nwithout taking advantage of a VERY marginal-looking continental breakfast\u00a0and took off to explore Cleveland instead. We found our way to the
\nPlayhouse Square area, where there is quite a bit of gentrification and
\nremodeling going on, and after some Starbucks coffee\/breakfast, walked
\naround there for a bit, before driving through downtown towards the
\nwaterfront, along the lake, and then toward the Westside Market, where we
\nwere meeting my old friend Paul and his partner Miguel (pronounced Michael)\u00a0for some shopping and lunch. Westside Market is a 100-year old indoor food\u00a0market, which offers traditional meat, veggies, and baked goods alongside\u00a0international specialties, and caters to regular shoppers from the\u00a0neighborhood as well as to tourists and hipsters. We saw some great baked\u00a0goods, but we only bought a Russian tea biscuit (a good bit like a scone,\u00a0but with more fruit) for later, and we had a great time people watching.\u00a0There was a sort of balcony\/gallery from which you could see the whole\u00a0market hall from above–really neat!<\/p>\n

Then we went to a little cafe\/diner for some lunch; Paul, Miguel and I all
\nhad a middle eastern pita roll, and Mark had a roast beef sandwich. Paul,
\nwho was born and raised in Cleveland, had some great stories about going to\u00a0Westside as a kid, and he also shed light on the uneven development we’d
\nseen, with some areas very run-down and clearly abandoned. Cleveland lost
\n2\/3 of its population since its peak times, so it’s no wonder that some
\nareas were never built back up after the collapse of some of its key
\nindustries. But the downtown is doing well, and the touristy area around
\nthe Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame showed lots of signs of life. That’s where we
\nheaded after saying goodbye to Paul and Miguel, and we spent a couple of
\nhours at the “Rock Hall,” for short. It was an okay experience, but nothing
\nblew us out of the water. There were some interactive exhibits with lots of
\naudio and video, but the challenge of building a museum of VISUAL things
\naround and AUDIO experience did make for some shortcomings. We spent a bit\u00a0of time in a temporary Paul Simon special exhibit with lots of interviews on\u00a0video screens that was good, and we also liked a pretty experimental
\n11-minute multi-screen video about the rise and diversity (but unfortunately\u00a0not the fall) of the music video since the beginnings of MTV. And a\u00a0recreation of the stage of Pink Floyd’s Wall tour concert stage, with the\u00a0creepy bug-like teacher lurking over us at the top of the wall brought back\u00a0some memories of my second-oldest taste in pop. (I remember bring 14 and\u00a0finally buying myself a copy of the vinyl double album after having
\nscratched up my boyfriend’s copy on our record player.) But the endless
\narray of that rock singer’s guitar and this other artist’s outfit for a
\nconcert tour just got a bit old after a while. I guess I am past the age
\nwhere my heart goes aflutter when seeing John Lennon’s outfit from the cover\u00a0of _Sergeant Pepper_ (the lime-green satin “uniform” designed by a costume\u00a0designer for the cover).<\/p>\n

After a couple of hours in the Hall of Fame, we got back into the car and
\ntook off, for the 3 1\/2 hour drive to Buffalo, NY. It was an uneventful
\ndrive, this time actually with sunshine, but since it was all Interstate, we
\nonly caught a couple of glimpses of Lake Erie. We got to our hotel at about
\n5:30, went to a nearby Ruby Tuesday’s for the salad bar for dinner, and then
\ndecided to go to Niagara Falls yet that night rather than waiting until
\nmorning, since we had good weather and still quite a bit of daylight left.
\nIt was about a 40-minute drive to the falls, and we managed to find street
\nparking right outside the state park, and do all the free stuff (seeing the
\nfalls, but not getting on any boats or climb down to the bottom of the
\nwaterfall) in the two hours or so we spent there. The falls are impressive,
\nbut the park is super manicured, and the surrounding area on both the
\nAmerican and the Canadian side is very built up with both industrial stuff
\nand casinos and hotel. So it’s hard to overlook the hypercivilized
\nenvironment and just focus on the falls, especially if one knows that their
\n“majesty” is so very much controlled by people–humans divert a huge part of\u00a0the water upstream for power, even more during the non-tourist season. But\u00a0there were some beautiful sites from which we could see the American falls\u00a0and Horseshoe falls, and there was also good people watching. It was very\u00a0busy throughout the state park, and tourists from all over the world were\u00a0speaking all kinds of languages, but surprisingly, the dominant tourist
\ngroup were multigenerational Indian families. It was surprising to see so
\nmany saris and other traditional outfits, especially the grandmas, who
\ntended to be most traditionally dressed. We walked around and looked at the\u00a0Falls from various angles until about sunset, and then drove back to our
\nBuffalo hotel. We have no idea how far we want to get tomorrow!<\/p>\n

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  This was an eventful day! We checked out of our somewhat marginal hotel without taking advantage of a VERY marginal-looking continental breakfast\u00a0and took off to explore Cleveland instead. We found our way to the Playhouse Square area, where there is quite a bit of gentrification and remodeling going on, and after some Starbucks coffee\/breakfast, … Continue reading “Saturday, June 13 — Cleveland to Buffalo \/ Niagara Falls (ca. 260 miles)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roadtrip2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1471"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1478,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions\/1478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}