After taking the Hop on/Hop off Bus in Chicago we took the AMTRAK Lake Shore Limited to Cleveland. The Amtrak station is called the Lakefront Station and arrived at 0545 in the morning. This was a bit of a disappointment because the last time I took a train from Chicago was in 1959 and you could say a few things have changed since than. The train was on the New York Central Railroad and it's terminal was in the Terminal Tower which was then the tallest building in the USA outside of New York. Needless to say, the Lakefront Station doesn't live up to the grandeur of the old TT as we called it.
Cleveland is my place of birth and I grew up there. I still maintain that Cleveland was the ideal place for a kid, especially this kid, to grow up in. I grew up in Garfield Heights a suburb contiguous to to Cleveland. It, Garfield Heights, wasn't big city living and it wasn't quite suburban life either. I became streetwise at an early age but I didn't have to live among gangs and high crime either.
My sister also still lives in Cleveland. FYI, I define Cleveland as everyplace between Harrisburg, PA and Chicago. It's not a really nice place to visit and I certainly don't want to live there. There is a lot of culture in Cleveland. There is a world class orchestra and art museum and a huge library to get immersed in as I used to do on one of my many days of playing hooky. The place has changed a lot, for the good, since I left there fifty nine years ago. I am now a card carrying Long Beach resident.
We had a nice time while there and I visited with my sister and her husband, saw my childhood friend Art and got reacquainted with my cousin Nancy whom I hadn't seen in decades.
But five or six days is all my crotchety self can take these days so we stayed at the Red Roof Inn near the airport and then took a Uber to the station to catch the 0550 on the Thursday morning train to Buffalo where we are now.
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