Day 13: Toledo, Ohio to Strongsville, Ohio

We were the only guests who got to enjoy breakfast at the Mansion View Inn this morning. Like the inn itself, the breakfast was aesthetically beautiful, obviously crafted by someone with an eye for beautiful things. We enjoyed a meal that you can only get when you are the sole guests of someone who loves to entertain. We started with a yogurt, berry, and granola parfait that would have been a satisfying breakfast alone. Then, there was the breakfast main course, a veggie and cheese omelet, roasted potatoes, asparagus spears, bacon, and an artfully arranged selection of yellow and green kiwis. This was more than we could finish, but we made a valiant effort.
We chatted with the couple that had been contracted to manage the bed and breakfast. We talked with them about their kids, jobs, the responsibilities of managing the inn, and our trip. The husband, who had been a commercial photographer, told us about a similar trip he had taken to New Mexico with a friend to shoot a hot air balloon festival. He talked about how much he had enjoyed taking pictures of all the small towns along the way. And we talked about how, given the rising price of gas, the road trip might soon become a dying tradition if it hasn’t already.
After breakfast, we set off toward Strongsville. Strongsville is a suburb south of Cleveland where Aaron grew up and where his parents still live. Shortly after we were east of Toledo, the brilliant sunshine that had followed us all the way from western Oregon began to dim and we found ourselves under Northern Ohio’s characteristic cloud cover. We know better than to complain about this. The weather has been phenomenally cooperative since the beginning of our trip, and we know that we have been lucky. A meteorologist would attribute this weather to the remnants of tropical storm Faye, which lingered over Florida for days and eventually dispersed into clouds and rain over the rest of the country. We assumed that it was just Cleveland’s way of welcoming us back. It’s just not Cleveland unless it’s cloudy.
We saw many of the same things in northern Ohio that we had seen in the rest of the Midwest. We saw many agricultural areas and small towns, but the fields were getting smaller and the towns were getting closer and closer together. The main streets of the towns were getting larger and the buildings were more densely packed. There were fewer town signs, establishing the town as the Honey Capital of the Nation (Randolph, Nebraska, Iowa) or the Jackalope Capital of the World (Douglas, Wyoming). (Wikipedia has a great list of town nicknames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_nicknames_in_the_United_States. A fantastic one that we didn’t get to see is Des Moines “Hartford of the West.” ) But, there were still a few gems. Our favorite was an orange banner strung across the road advertising, with the article-free exuberance that is usually reserved for Chinese take-out menus, “Super Gun Raffle!”
As we’ve noted before, we spend a lot of our time on the road listening to NPR. But occasionally, we realized that we had already listened to that episode of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” or we decided that we just couldn’t listen to another hour of the chattering hydra that is political talk radio. In those instances, one of us would begin flipping through the stations. Aaron has been a radio and TV flipper for as long as I have known him. When the station plays a song he doesn’t like or goes to commercial, he begins flipping through the stations for something better. Sometimes this flipping can last for several minutes and through several cycles of the available radio stations. I, on the other hand, was a stay-the-course radio listener. I would flip through the stations to find out which one had a solid signal and played the kind of music that, on the whole, I liked to listen to, and I stuck with it, even through commercials and annoying songs. In the early days of our courtship, this was the kind of personal difference that lead to stupid, surprisingly heated arguments. I thought I might never get to hear a full song on the radio again. But, somewhere along the way, I stopped minding the flipping and even adopted it myself. I have mellowed significantly in my old age.
In our music listening, it was really amazing how many of the same songs are played over and over again. Anyone who listens to radio understands that some decent songs are overplayed until all of their charm is sapped. In the western Midwest, that song was “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It,” a pop song destined to be played at thousands of college parties when the Girls Gone Wild set is just drunk enough to take the hint. As we moved east, the overplayed songs changed. “Love Song,” by Sarah Bareilles, though it is no longer new, is still played enough in the eastern Midwest that you can hear it on some station just about any time. In the same set is Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” (“When I Ruled the World”). There are also a few older songs that have remained popular enough to be a bit overplayed years and sometimes decades after their release. West of Iowa, it was “She’s Got Legs” by ZZ Top, and Sweet Home Alabama. Iowa and eastward, it’s American Pie, and anything by Billy Joel. Queen and Nirvana are pervasive everywhere. Some of these songs are more objectionable than others, but the new songs get the most play by far, and get less enjoyable and more grating every time you hear them.
Around 2:30, we turned off of Route 20 and onto State Route 82 West on our way to Strongsville. Around 3:00, we arrived at our favorite and most frequent lodging spot, “Becky and Ed’s Breakfast and Bed” aka Aaron’s Parents’ House. For months, they had been preparing to throw a party for us on our one night stop. Aaron’s dad, Ed, told us that he had cleaned the porch room, cleaned out the garage, and stained the deck and generally made their already clean house pristine. However, all his efforts had backfired because now the porch was so clean that he wasn’t allowed to smoke his beloved cigars there until winter. It was unnecessary to point out who was enforcing this ban. The consummate hostess, Becky, Aaron’s mom, had made burgers and hot dogs and spent most of the time before the party getting food ready for the guests. About half an hour later, my parents arrived from Granville, Ohio. I was amazed that we had beat them there because my mother has readily admitted that she will probably be early to her own funeral. We all gathered around the kitchen table and talked, mostly about our road trip adventures. In a way, I felt like we had nothing left to tell them. As our parents, they were almost the only people who had the endurance to actually keep up with this novel-sized travel log, and so they already knew almost all of the details of our trip. They had already read most of the stories. But they were kind enough to let us tell them all again.
Eventually, the Eliases’ family friends and our friends from college started arriving. We hadn’t seen most of these people since our wedding almost a year ago, and it was a warm reunion. It was particularly great to see our friends from college and talk about all that was new. People had new jobs. Some had bought their first homes. Some were newlyweds and others were about to be. We looked at pictures, took a few new ones, and generally expressed amazement that time was moving forward.