Todd Orr

 Our last stop on the second leg is in Cleveland - and this is the most important stop because we get to see the Guardians (formerly known as the Indians) play.  We drove from Detroit to Cleveland, mostly on U.S. Highway 20, on Friday, May 26.  As we've mentioned this is a baseball and national parks trip, but to date, we haven't visited any national parks on this leg - primarily because there aren't any in the northeast and midwest. The exception is Cuyahoga Valley National Park which we visited on Saturday, May 27.  I lived in Akron, Ohio (south of Cleveland) from ages 9 to 13.  When I lived in northeast Ohio, it was full of heavy industry (steel, automobiles, tires) - which is mostly all gone now.  In addition, the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Akron and up to Lake Erie in Cleveland was severely polluted.  Some may recall that the Cuyahoga famously caught fire in 1969 as captured in the Randy Newman song "Burn On". Thankfully, the Cuyahoga has...

We arrived in Detroit on Wednesday, May 24 leaving weather in the 80's in Cincinnati and arriving to weather in the 60's in Detroit.  We'd gotten a little slack in our planning for Detroit and didn't have tickets for the game or plans for our non-game time until about a day before we arrived (this is the way I like it). As we drove to Detroit, Melinda was looking at things to do on her phone and found there is a Motown Museum.  Since we're both big Motown fans, she immediately bought us tickets for the next day.  For our readers under 50, Motown is the famous African-American owned record company founded in Detroit in 1959 and which produced numerous soul and R&B hits during the 1960's and 1970's.  It was founded and operated from a house on West Grand Blvd. - you can see Melinda standing in front of the house. We had a one hour guided tour which was fantastic.  This included a visit for Studio 1A where the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the ...

We left Pittsburgh on Monday, May 21 and drove to Cincinnati.  We're trying, as much as possible, to not drive on interstate highways between cities.  Driving U.S. Highways and other local roads is slower, but it provides more local flavor - every interstate exit has the same fast food places and gas stations.  However, there weren't a lot of good non-interstate options from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, so we took three 7x interstates (79, 70, 71) and made good time. Our hotel was in Newport, Kentucky which is just across the Ohio River from Cincy.  We stayed right on the river but our hotel room only had a good view of the highway.  But we had a nice river view dinner outside the first evening at a restaurant near our hotel.  On Tuesday (May 22), we explored Cincinnati by driving around.  It's a pretty big city but the traffic wasn't bad.  We visited Eden Park on the bluffs over the Ohio and then drove through downtown and to the Over-the Rhine (OTR...

 We sadly left Toronto on Friday, May 20 and drove to Niagara Falls.   We've never been to Niagara Falls but we had to get back into the U.S. somehow, and it was on the way.  We didn't know much about it, other than being kind of tacky and touristy (which it is), but we enjoyed the day.  We started on the Canadian side of the Falls and went to Queen Victoria park.  If you don't know, there are two primary waterfalls at Niagara - Horseshoe Falls and the American falls.  The QV park is the best way to see Horseshoe Falls from land (the picture of Melinda to the right is the top of Horseshoe Falls). The picture to the left is the Maid of the Mist boat heading up into the spray from Horseshoe Falls.  The Maid of the Mist leaves from the U.S. side, but there are similar boats that leave from the Canadian side.  If we'd understood things better, we would have done all of our Falls activity from the Canadian side.   To get to the U.S. side...

 On our way from Boston to Toronto, we built in a stop at Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.  To get to Cooperstown, we took a less direct path that took us across southern Vermont with a lunch stop in Bennington, VT.  Neither Melinda and I had ever been to Vermont, and we enjoyed the trip across the Green Mountains and can now add Vermont to our listed states visited. Cooperstown is a small town in upstate New York and it wasn't very busy when we were there, which was great for us.  We spent all day Monday, May 15 visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame.  There were all kinds of interesting exhibits on different facets of baseball from baseball cards to stadiums to the African-American history with baseball.  The afternoon was devoted to looking at the plaques of all the players, managers and executives who have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame.  Everyone from Babe Ruth to Lou Gehrig to Ted Williams to Eddie Murray to Jackie Robinson.  ...

 Before heading to Fenway to see the Red Sox, we first had to drive up the East Coast from Baltimore. On Thursday, May 11 we had the pleasure of driving up I-95 all the way to Rhode Island.  We had the fun of crossing the GW Bridge in New York and the bumper car like experience of going through the Cross-Bronx Expressway. But we made it to Westport, MA (just across the RI border) just fine. We chose to go to Rhode Island (Newport specifically) because I had only been once before in the 70's and Melinda had never been.  If you don't know, Newport used to be the playground of all the robber barons in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and there are huge mansions they built on the coast.  We chose to visit one called the Breakers which was built by the Vanderbilt family.  Yes, the same family that built the Biltmore in Asheville.  The Breakers is even more ornate than the Biltmore (bet you didn't think that was possible).  We spent a couple of hours touri...

 On Tuesday, May 9, we backtracked from New York down to Baltimore - due the vagaries of the MLB schedule.  That meant taking the train back to Trenton and then driving back down I-95 past Philly to Baltimore. One of the nicknames of Baltimore is Charm City, but for some reason Google Maps took us through the less charming portions of East Baltimore to our hotel (which was easy walking distance to the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards).  On Wednesday, before the game, we spent the morning and early afternoon walking through the Inner Harbor area and practicing our selfie skills.  We'd been here a number of times before, but not for many years.  When we lived in Herndon, Va in the early 90's, there was no MLB baseball in D.C. so we would come to Baltimore to see the Orioles.  We recalled some of our other trips to Baltimore including meeting my parents to go to the National Aquarium (when my Dad locked his keys in his car - don't ask) and going to the 1993 All S...

 Greetings from the Big Apple!  We were able to work the schedule to see the Mets and Yankees on back to back days.  If you're wondering, we did not drive Melinda's CRV into Manhattan.  You can take the New Jersey Transit train from Trenton NJ right into Penn Station in Manhattan.  So, on Saturday, May 6 we drove from Philadelphia to Trenton (about 45 minutes), parked our car in a parking garage at the train station and took the local to Penn Station.  And the best thing about the train was it was $7.65 each one way - it pays to be a senior citizen. Our hotel in Manhattan was nice midtown location.  It was a beautiful day so after we checked in we walked up to Bryant Park and then strolled up 6th Ave. all the way to Central Park.  We had not been to New York in over a decade, and we couldn't believe the new really tall buildings on billionaire's row near Central Park south (see picture to the right).  I tried to convince Melinda that we shoul...

 Our second stop on Leg 2 was in Philadelphia to see the Phillies play the Red Sox.  As this was a night game, we had the day to spend in Philly - which we're familiar with since my parents lived there for a number of years, but we hadn't been there in over 20 years. We went to the Philadelphia Art Museum although we did not go in.  It was a nice morning, so we wandered the grounds and the multiple statues as well as the trail along the Schuykill River near the boathouses.  Besides the art (which we did not see) the Art Museum is well known for 1) the great views of center city Philadelphia from the top of the stairs and 2) for the Rocky statue.  For those who have never seen Rocky I, Rocky runs up the Art Museum steps as part of his training routine.  We did not run up the steps, but we did watch others "recreating" the scene while being filmed on mobile phones. After leaving the Art Museum we went to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch.  Philly, al...

 We left for the second leg of our Baseball and National Park trip on Tuesday, May 2.  Our first stop was Washington, D.C.  On the way up we stopped in Northern Virginia so see some of the places we lived including our old house in Herndon, Va (where we lived before we moved to Durham in 1996), the house that Melinda grew up in in Vienna, Va (sadly, recently torn down and replaced by a McMansion) and the house I lived in in Vienna in the 1970's (when I met Melinda).  The memories were so thick we had to brush them away from our faces (to quote an old baseball movie). On Wednesday, we spent the day visiting the National Museum of African-American History and Culture down on the National Mall.  We've been wanting to go since it opened and are so glad we finally made it.  It is a great museum and we learned a lot.  Much of it was heartbreaking, but redemptive nonetheless.  If you haven't been there yet, we highly recommend a visit the next time you'r...