Buffalo, NY to Cleveland, OH (September 7)

Distance traveled today: 193 miles

Distance traveled total: 695 miles

Estimated mileage remaining: 2805 (80% left to go)

 

I woke up in Buffalo bracing for the worst.  Tropical Storm Lee had closed in on the city, and every forecast I had read predicted that I would be driving through rain for three straight days.  Before my trip, I had anticipated that I would take rainy days off from driving for fear that cars might not be able to see me as well through a haze of raindrops.  But riding out a storm for days seemed excessive, and after losing a day to rain in Syracuse, I felt a somewhat heightened sense of urgency to continue on.  Besides, my planned stay in Ann Arbor, MI was time-sensitive since my host would be out of town for the weekend, so I had decided that I would just have to endure a few days of misery.  After all, in a town where buffalo imagery runs rampant, I had to summon my own inner bison and recognize that the fastest way through the storm is through the storm.

Or maybe I wouldn’t need to kick it into buffalo mode just yet.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t raining when I woke up, which made my decision to go for it a bit easier.  Not knowing how long this dry window would last, I hurriedly hit the road for Cleveland.

After driving through downtown Buffalo, I was thrilled to finally lay eyes upon my beloved Great Lakes!  Even the cold, gray weather couldn’t dampen my spirits upon seeing Lake Erie stretch to the horizon.  I feel as though a lot of people who have never seen the Great Lakes vastly underestimate their splendor, but let me tell you- these lakes are Great for a reason.  As a native Michigander I might be biased, but I’ve always felt that the Great Lakes offer all of the benefits of the ocean (sandy beaches, sunrises/sunsets, big waves) with none of the drawbacks (disgusting salty taste, tacky boardwalks, overdevelopment, shark attacks).  But don’t take my word for it- go see them for yourself.

East Coast? West Coast? The North Coast is really the place to be.

Anyways, as I passed the Port of Buffalo, some quixotic part of me was tempted to go down to the docks in an effort to schmooze some ship captain into granting me (and the Metro) passage aboard his schooner in exchange for my services as a deckhand.  I could easily get to Cleveland or Chicago, or if I got really ambitious and wanted to throw a fork in my plans, I could go all the way up to Duluth and scoot away from there.  But, the landlubber that I am, I didn’t try it.  Just another idea that will have to wait ‘til a future adventure.

As the odometer rolled on, I was in no hurry to leave the shore of Lake Erie, so I called an audible and elected to take the “Seaway Trail” along the lakeshore for the day instead of subjecting myself to yet another day on Route 20 as I had originally planned.

I found it to be a pretty gratifying decision.  Instead of spending my day alongside semi-trucks and comparatively heavy traffic, much of my drive was spent with vineyards to my left and the lake on my right.  Though not much of a wine connoisseur, this enjoyable stretch of road led my imagination to envision someday buying one of these farmhouses on the lake if I can think of a good name for a winery.

There were other things of interest besides vineyards and that big lake.  At one point, I pulled over at a derelict drive-in movie place that had long since closed.  It looked like an ideal setting for an episode of Scooby Doo.  And I would’ve stopped there for lunch too if it weren’t for those meddlin’ nimbus clouds, so I kept pluggin’ along and eventually tried my luck at an old lighthouse, which to my misfortune was closed only on Wednesdays.  Bummer, ‘cause I’m guessing I won’t encounter too many more of those between here and California.

Grapes of my path.

At last, the roads of my Empire State came to an end and I entered the exotic land of Pennsylvania.  Driving only through its dinky panhandle, Pennsylvania is the state that I’ll be experiencing the least on my trip. Even so, I found that that stretch of William Penn’s land is not as insignificant as you might think, especially for those traveling by scooter.  You see, the Metro gets close to 100 miles to the gallon, but its gas tank only holds slightly more than that, necessitating frequent fuel stops.  Once the needle on the fuel gauge gets to 40% strength or so, I begin to look for a place to fill up, not knowing exactly when I’ll come across my next gas station.  Unfortunately for scooterists, not many gas stations plunk down the cash for lakefront property along the Seaway Trail, so I drove for mile after mile without coming across a place for petrol, the needle continuing its precipitous drop towards 'E' all the while.  Signs indicated that Erie, PA was less than 20 miles away, and doing the math in my head based on the mileage covered since my last visit to the pump, I knew I was going to be cutting it close.

And so, on the unforgiving roads in the suddenly expansive panhandle of Pennsylvania, I first dabbled in hypermiling, easing up on the gas and coasting whenever possible.  Luckily I puttered into a gas station right outside of Erie, where the Metro slaked its thirst for fuel.  It took over a gallon to fill, so I guessed that I had been only a matter of miles from running dry (someday out in the Nevada desert, once I’ve strapped a security gas can to the back of the scooter, I’ll see just how far the Metro can go on a full tank, but until that time I’d like to spare myself the suspense).  Lesson learned, I think I’m going to get gas even more frequently going forward.  Traveling backroads the way I do, you just never know when the next gas station will come along.

Entering the nub of Pennsylvania.

With crisis averted, I stuck with my tradition of eating lunch in town parks by stopping in the surprisingly bustling downtown square of Erie, PA for some vittles.  While bison are the undisputed mascot of Buffalo, frogs rule supreme down in Erie.  I noticed an unusual number of frog statues throughout the city as I continued my drive.  They were literally all over town, decoratively placed on street corners, and in front of schools and businesses.  Erie just can’t get enough of its frogs.

(As a quick aside in our discussion of cities and their spirit animals, I noticed that good old Dunkirk, NY only a few miles up the road refused to favor any one species and has a whole menagerie of critters immortalized by its street names.  At first I saw “Pangolin Street” and kind of laughed to myself about a street coincidentally sharing a name with an armored African mammal, but soon I passed Armadillo, Ermine, Zebra, and Beaver Streets, so I knew something was up.  And the animal names kept going.  There seemed to be some order to it as well, as the streets interestingly shifted from clumps of armored creature names to obscure weasel and cat type things to ungulates and finally birds.  Check it out on Google Maps if you feel so inclined.)

Thankful that it still hadn’t rained on me, I finally came to the Ohio state line (or as students at a certain institution riddled with NCAA violations would say, THE Ohio State Line).  It felt good to be able to hit three different states in one day- the only time on my trip when I’ll be able to do that (I was already leaning towards breaking up my 240-mile stretch from Ann Arbor to Chicago).  But reaching Ohio soil felt even better since I was entering a state universally described as Midwestern!  As if the Great Lakes hadn’t signified enough of a westward shift, being in Ohio meant that I was officially in a new part of the country.

THEEE Ohio State Border.

After spending a very full day crunched up on a scooter in 50-degree temperatures, I would be content to stop anywhere for the night, but I was especially excited about approaching my old hometown of Cleveland, where I spent a very happy chapter of my childhood from kindergarten to sixth grade.  The brunt of jokes across the nation, “The Mistake on The Lake” might be fairly blighted, but it gets an undeservingly bad wrap and holds a very dear place in my heart.

One of the many things I love about Cleveland is the way in which it’s a big city that occasionally has a small town feel to it.  For instance, while waiting in a coffee place for my host to get back to his apartment, who should I run into but one of my best friends from fifth and sixth grade!  Like in the Bruce Springsteen song “Glory Days”, we went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks, but differed from the song by not discussing glory days, but rather our uncertain plans for the future before wishing each other well and going our separate ways.

There was never a dull moment of conversation with my host Alex, a former little league teammate and a fellow diehard Cleveland sports fan.  Obviously we talked Indians for a bit, but our dialogue also touched on some serious stuff at times, including a discussion of the fate of our hometown.  We expressed optimism that its protracted, decades-long fall from glory was cyclical to some extent and that if Cleveland ever had competent and non-corrupt leadership in place, it could experience some type of renaissance.  After all, the city has practically hit rock bottom, and there’s only one way to go from there: up.  With literally almost nothing stretching from East 30^th Street to East 90^th Street, there is block after block of vacant lots and condemned or dilapidated buildings that can be yours for as little as $5,000 to $10,000 in some cases.  We mused about saving up some money and buying an entire city block or two, waiting for the day that Cleveland real estate would be a hot commodity again.

It’s really not such a crazy idea.  Someday metropolitan areas will no longer have the option of growing forever outward into surrounding hinterlands and will have to concentrate their populations, infrastructure, and other resources back in the long-forgotten urban core.  Back at Carleton, one of our professors (George, for you fellow Environmental Studies majors) once outlined the bleak situations in places like Detroit and Cleveland but concluded by saying that these places were “ripe for revolution” and fertile ground for positive change to take root.  I prefer taking that glass-half-full outlook and am hopeful that better days lie ahead for both cities.

This got me thinkin’ that maybe Cleveland needs a good spirit animal like Erie and Buffalo.  Perhaps it should adopt something like a phoenix, symbolizing its eventual rise from the ashes.  But fairy tale stuff like that isn’t well suited for a place like Cleveland.  I think something tough and resilient, like a honey badger, would nicely reflect the town’s gritty attitude.  Yeah, I’ll take the honey badger. 

(And if any of you aren’t familiar with the awesome power of honey badgers, type their name into Youtube when you get a chance.  Then sit back and enjoy the ride as it rips a cobra’s face off.)

Shout-Outs:

-Alex, who not only gave me good company and a place to stay for the night, but also shared some sage advice about blogging.

-Andrew, the aforementioned friend who I ran into in the coffee place.  Good luck with the LSAT!
-The baristas at the coffee place, who asked me questions about my trip.  They were disappointed that I was making the journey for a job and not for a girl.

Town(s) of the Day: Silver Creek, NY; Erie, PA