Cuyahoga Valley National Park

The Quality Inn in Fayetteville was nothing special, perhaps our least memorable hotel, but it was clean and convenient and the breakfast was interesting.  It was staged in a gift shop, with T-shirts and refrigerator magnets for sale along the perimeter of the tiny room and, strangely enough, cartoons playing silently on the TV. 

 

We left the mountains of West Virginia and drove north into the flat lower Great Lakes Basin, mostly interstate driving with more and more industry, traffic, and trucks on the road.  I have noticed that there is a peculiar community among travelers.  Often we would see the same familiar cars at rest stops along the way, again and again, and almost feel as if we knew them, although they were complete strangers.  And there are bonds of civility, too – cars graciously moving over into the other lane to allow others to join the flow of traffic from an entrance ramp, or rudely hogging the left-hand lane so that you would have to pass dangerously on the right, or angrily hanging one car length behind waiting to roar past.  We live in a relatively rural part of the country, but it did seem to me that the farther north we drove the more aggressive the driving became.  The route through Akron and northward toward Cleveland was especially nerve-wracking, and we were glad when we were able to get off the interstate onto two-lane roads again and put the top down on the Mini.  

 

Somewhere along the way we noticed that we were not seeing kudzu anymore, that ubiquitous invasive Southern vine that climbs up utility poles and engulfs abandoned houses and cars in fantastic topiary formations along the roadside.  Was kudzu just a southern phenomenon, like grits and cornbread, or would we see little patches of it as we traveled north into Ohio and Indiana?  We took a nice detour to Brandywine Falls on the way to our second National Park.   

 

I had never heard of Cuyahoga Valley National Park before this trip, but it turned out to be a lovely place.

There was a small historic village behind the Visitor Center, and we enjoyed visiting the old buildings.

 

There were still remnants of the tow path of the Erie Canal nearby, which was grown in now but was being used for cycling and hiking. 

 

Our lodging for the night was one of our nicest ones, Shady Oaks Farm Bed & Breakfast in nearby Northfield, Ohio.  We drove down a long, shady gravel driveway to the house and met the young owners, Melanie and Jeff, and their two daughters, Addy and Amelia, a lovely little family.   

 

The room was beautiful, furnished with antique furniture.  We asked Melanie if there was a restaurant nearby and she directed us to Dos Coronas, the first of many Mexican restaurants which we found worked well for us on this trip.  On the way, though, I couldn’t help noticing, right down the road in this quiet neighborhood among these gentle innkeepers and their daughters, a run-down-looking house with a huge sign displayed out front, half as big as the house:  BIDEN SUCKS.  Oh, please:  get over it.  Or as the object of this embittered Northfield resident put it in that memorable debate, “Will you shut up, Man?”

 

We returned after dinner to the peace and quiet of Shady Oaks Farm and discovered that there was a Scrabble game in the well-equipped dining room, so we sat outside on the patio and enjoyed the simple pastime of making words out of random letters as the sun went down.