The Anniversary! The Great OH Odyssey

**Lyd, Joy and Megan waiting for Lyd to play at the Treehouse.


O.K., so it has been a year since the largest nerd ever got married (that's me)! My lovely and clearly wine-blind wife and I had a fun Ninja-style attack on Ohio over the past 24 hours. Here's how it went..

After I returned home from work, we packed it up and headed to The Treehouse for Lyd's early show. Thanks to Megan Burkholder for coming out, BTW!

We bolted DIRECTLY from there to the small midwestern town of Wooster, Ohio and checked in to the Hyatt. It was about half way between CBUS and the industrial nightmare wasteland that is Cleveland. After a jacuzzi, some champagne and things they won't EVER mention in sex-ed, we hit the hay. Arising at the crack o' NINE, we went into the sleepy downtown Wooster shopping district, and had completely forgotten that small towns are entirely closed on Sundays. All we found open was a great little coffee shop called "Muddy Waters," where we met the head of the Chamber Of Commerce. He bought us coffee (NICE, right?) and sped off to a large event the town had going on later that day. As we left, we drove out through Cuyahoga Falls NP. Oddly, Wooster would turn out to be a highlight for the rest of the trip.


**Downtown Wooster, established in 1779!

We had been very excited to visit Lake Erie after living here for three years, and decided to head towards the PA border and stop in a place called Geneva On The Lake. We were starving, and though we'd grab a bite in this seaside tourist town. OH..wait..it's frikkin' 40 damn degrees there when we arrived, and the Lake looked the f*****g Bermuda Triangle during Hurricane Kill Your Ass. That wasn't the worst of it. Picture Coney Island in the 1930's. Now picture it deserted, in a post-apocolyptic nightmare with zombie Carnie-folk....and nobody has been there to paint, clean or UPDATE anything since the place opened in 1930. We left as quickly as we had arrived, sad that we had left the shopping comfort of Banana Republic for Carnie hell.


**Lyd looking quickly at an angry body of water in Carnie Hell, a.k.a. Geneva On The Lake.


It was funny, too...because there were "wine tasting rooms" and wineries everywhere. Odd thing is, it actually requires SUNLIGHT to make good grapes, an the only thing I would ever taste in wine grown there is depression. The LODGE there was renting beach-cruisers for a place with no beach, just cold. I could smell the death of the Edmund Fitzgerald in the air. GONE is what we quickly became, turning west for the now-deserted ton of Cleveland. Lightning struck hard just outside of the city, and the blinding deluge of rain made me wonder what money could have made living on this frozen steppe worth staying for. Summer up there only lasts for about three months...SO not worth the concrete-gobbling effects of the long winter.


**Visit beautiful lake-front Cleveland TODAY!

Heading south in a speedy departure, we saw one of the most depressingly industrial nightmares conceivable. It was all smokestacks belching death into the cold air, and a landscape that was reminiscent of Nazi "scorched earth" policies through Europe.
We briefly stopped for a long overdue dinner, the made a soggy bee-line for home. Thankfully Lyd is a great driving partner, and we had fun goofing on all the religious programming that seemed to dominate the economically depressed areas of northern Ohio. Although it sounds awful, it was actually a great 24hr tour of an anniversary. In one day, we saw more of Ohio than we have in three years. Would I ever visit Cleveland again soon? Probably not. Would I do it twenty four years from now on another anniversary just for fun? Damn skippy.