This past weekend Corina and I embarked on a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio. It seems the biggest question most people asked beforehand was why? And to answer that it was really a just because trip. She and I both had a blast on our trip to Chicago, which sort of got us on a kick about driving to major US cities. We took our honeymoon trip to Boston, and I personally went to Pittsburgh last year to see an NHL playoff game. So I had the idea of driving to Cleveland after my visit to Pittsburgh, mainly because it seemed like a pretty manageable drive to do in a day.

The big scheme for this trip was to go see a Cleveland Indians game and check out the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Things started off badly on Thursday night as I went to go look for the tickets to the game which had been FedEx’d to me a month and a half before and couldn’t find them. I have this bad habit of leaving things in envelopes and just throwing them somewhere, so I suspect I actually threw out the tickets in a tidy up frenzy awhile back when I got my new computer. I was just crushed by this, as I had secured some pretty good seats and now had nothing to show for it. So I then went online to StubHub and ordered some e-tickets which were about half the price of the lost tickets, but at least we were able to go to the game.

The drive down was pretty easy and straight-forward. We were staying at the Hyatt-Regency Arcade in downtown Cleveland, which was absolutely awesome. The Arcade was apparently the first mall built in America and was originally financed by J.D. Rockefeller. The Hyatt retrofit the building, turning the top 3 floors of the mall into hotel rooms, while leaving the bottom 2 as retail space. It was a very cool place to stay. The first room we got had a broken bed, so we ended up getting upgraded to another room that goes for $550 a night. It was pretty awesome.

The baseball game was pretty great. The Indians jumped out to a 5-0 lead after 2 innings, only to have the Twins claw back and make it interesting in the 9th. Canadian boy Justin Morneau hit a 2 run homer which I managed to capture with my camera.

It landed about 15 feet to our right. Everyone was chanting to throw it back, but they didn’t. Afterward there was a huge fireworks display. I have to say, if there is one thing America knows how to do well, it’s blow shit up. This was probably one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen.

We went to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, which I have to say was massively underwhelming. It should be called the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame of America or something. As a fan of lots of music outside of the US it just wasn’t represented there. I suppose it’s not surprising though, since in reality they have only inducted bands up to 1983, so music that would have influenced and shaped my life really hasn’t been acknowledged yet. I found the only people who seemed to really be old people who really were into it. I heard one woman while we were walking down the Hall of Fame wall debating about how the Moody Blues should be inducted. This interested me, so I did some looking into the Moody Blues, as they were a band I know little to nothing about. They did Knights In White Satin, and that’s about it from the looks of it, so in my estimation there is probably a reason why they’re not in the Hall of Fame.

We probably couldn’t have asked for a better place to stay in Cleveland. It was right downtown and the one end of the Arcade lead right out into an area with lots of good places to eat. While there we checked out the Winking Lizard before the ballgame, which was a cool place and they were celebrating Christmas in July with Christmas tunes, cookies and candy canes which was rather amusing. We had dinner on Saturday at Fat Fish Blue, which was a Cajun restaurant. I quite liked the beer battered catfish I had. Makes me kinda wish we had a decent Cajun place around here. And on Saturday night we checked out a place called The Corner Alley, which was a hip martini bar/bowling alley. Unfortunately we couldn’t afford to bowl considering they charged per lane as opposed to per person, so we opted to play some pool and have a few drinks instead. Corina and I both did a lot of research for this trip on where to eat. On previous trips we were kinda lost as to where to get good food. It seems so odd, but in the big city it does tend to be hard to find good eats given the multitude of options. This time we were prepared. I found Chowhound to be a pretty good resource for information, as it tended to have lots of good grassroot recommendations that came through in spades.

Overall we had a good time on the trip, I would definitely recommend taking the trip and checking out a ballgame, and after doing the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame it kinda made me wish we went to the neighbouring Great Lakes Science Center instead.

I uploaded some photos from the trip to Picasa as well.