TrekPass – Travel Blog

We left Cleveland yesterday around 10 am, the drive was quiet difficult since we experienced several snowstorms and wind gusts of 35mph kicked in later on. After driving 380 miles west, we arrived in Chicago. We checked in at the Hyatt Rosemont close to the O’Hare airport at around 4pm. Later on we checked out the Hotels’ gym (oh, I feel I’m in pretty bad shape).

Today we took the L (I still confuse it with the Boston T, here it is the L which stands for Loop) into Downtown Chicago. Since it was our 2nd time here in Chicago, we just visited the most important landmarks: Navy Pier, Millennium Park, Sears Tower and John Hancock Center. After strolling on Michigan Avenue through the “windy city”, we finished our visit with the most famous restaurant “Pizzeria Uno” where we enjoyed the most popular deep dish pizza.

    Even though the weather forecast for Sunday predicted light snow accumulations in the Cleveland area we were surprised with lots of snow in the morning. Our car was covered with snow and the streets were pretty empty. Well, he had two choices, staying at the hotel for the day or trying to dig out our car and driving to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum – our urge to spend the day at the museum was exceeding the day at the hotel and therefore we took the risk and drove into downtown of Cleveland.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum

    We were quiet fascinated about the layout of the museum and we figured that it would take us at least 5 hours to finish the “rock’n roll journey”. The museum offered a variety of interactive and video presentations, movies, an awe-inspiring entrance plaza, costumes and riveting reading material. The highlight of the exhibits included a Hall of Fame multi-media production that combined film footage, music, interviews, animation and still photography to tell the stories of the performing artists like James Brown, Jimmie Rodgers, B.B. King, Roy Orbison, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Bob Marley, The Eagles, Tom Petty, Black Sabbath…etc.

The second highlight was an art exhibition by Philip Burke whose unique caricatures and portraits of celebrities have been featured in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Time and Vogue. For me, this was the highlight of the day since art fascinates me!

    Today was another nice day with clear sky and lots of sunshine. We had breakfast in the lobby and decided to drive to Cleveland rather than going to Pittsburgh. We figured that Pittsburgh doesn’t offer many things to see and we knew that there is at least one landmark in Cleveland that is a must to see – the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame museum.

    After leaving Dickson City at 10 am, we drove 350 miles West on Highway 80. After 3 hours of driving in perfect weather condition, it soon started to snow, it became foggy and we were forced to drive very slowly. We totally had to rely on our navigation system (Garmin) since signs were hard to identify because of the fog. After 5 hours of driving, we finally arrived in Cleveland. We checked into the Extended Stay Hotel (we bid on Priceline.com the night before and got a great Suite for $28, what a deal!).

    Later on, we stopped at McDonald’s and on the way found an Aldi store (I couldn’t believe it). For the ones who don’t know what Aldi is, it is one of the largest discount supermarket chain based in Germany. Besides Germany, it operates in many other European countries like Denmark, France and Netherlands and has spread as far as the United States and Australia. The prices are awesome cheap and of course we could not resist buying a few things.

    This was our last day in Boston; after we watched the news in the morning we were horrified, tornados in Alabama, blizzards in Milwaukee and heavy rain on the East Coast. We again changed our plans – with this kind of weather change, you really need to be flexible. We thought that being in the middle of a Tornado, which happens a lot in the Midwest, is much riskier than being stuck in the snow. At least with a major snowstorm you don’t get picked up from the road so easily as you could with a TornadoJ.

    Anyway, we left Boston around 11am when outside it poured like “cats and dogs” and it soon became very foggy on the road. After entering the state of New York it finally cleared off and a blue sky and lots of sunshine was lying in front of us! We stopped in Dickson City (what a name) which is a small skiing resort close to Scranton, Pennsylvania where we are staying tonight.

    A new “chapter” in our life begins today. After spending the first night at the AmeriSuites in Medford, we realized that our upcoming trip cross-country (Boston-San Diego) begins shortly. The past few days were pretty exhausting; since there was no way that we would move our whole household to the West coast we needed to make a decision. We ended up putting all our stuff into storage, except our furniture that we luckily sold on Craigslist. It is amazing how much clutter you actually collect and we were surprised that by only living here in Boston for six months, we accumulated so many things. After returning the keys to our landlords on Wednesday and ending my last day at work (I hate goodbyes, the company was very special to me, particularly the people and therefore made it even harder to go), we checked into AmeriSuites in Medford.

    Today was pretty relaxing, even though we had to bring our last box of “stuff” to the storage because it just wouldn’t fit in our car; we took the T into downtown Boston and visited one last time the harbor, Quincy market and the North End were we ended up having lunch at Giovanni’s. After getting back to the hotel, we saw in the news that snow is coming our way! With Blizzards in the Midwest and Tornado warnings in the South, we thought that we need to have a back-up plan!