We spent a couple of days in Cleveland, Ohio, which we didn;’t know much about but is actually quite a bustling place. Its main attraction is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum, which is huge and contains tonnes of memorabilia and information about bands and singers who’ve been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, etc. There was loads to look at, watch and read so we spent a good three hours in here without really realising – definitely worth seeing. We also visited the Science Museum, which wasn’t massive but had a NASA exhibition (a large number of astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, are from Ohio) and a biomedicine exhibition that was also intersting. A floor up, there were a number of ‘hands-on’ Sciencey experiments, probably designed more for kids but kept us busy for a long while! Annoyingly Kirsty beat me by 1/100th of a second on the reaction timer, which I wasn’t very happy about!

I also had the best meal of the trip so far in Cleveland – a fantastic prime rib steak in a place called the Chocolate Bar, where Kirsty also discovered chocolate orange martinis – her new favourite drink! We then continued Niagara-bound following a road alongside Lake Erie, and halfway between Cleveland and Niagara Falls we stayed in a city also called Erie. We expected this to be a dot on the landscape, but was actually a lot busier and bigger than expected. We stopped at Geneva marina, mainly for a toilet stop but we also bought what felt like the biggest ice-creams in the world – we managed to demolish them but not easily.

Erie itself had a lot to offer, including a peninsular into Lake Erie with a number of beaches along it. By chance, we had caught the weekend of their annual festival of some sort, so we were advised to go downtown where there were street vendors and live music, including from the band Lonestar, who you will remember from ‘Amazed’ and… well, nothing else, really! However, they were really good, and did a number of covers which we knew, and ended on their one hit, which was great. A good evening.

The following day, we took a bike ride again, this time testing our ability to work together by hiring a tandem bike! Apart from Kirsty’s back-seat driving at first, this was a great way to explore the Erie peninsular and we rode about 15km in total – good way to work off some of the previous day’s ginormous ice-cream!

We are now in Niagara Falls and greeted to an amazing view of the falls from our hotel room. More on Niagara in the next blog. Before I finish, though, I should come back to the Toga Murder Mystery I mentioned we were going to at the end of the last blog. This was probably the only part of the trip so far we certinaly wouldn’t recommend to other people – totally not as expected! It was more a Butlins show than a murder mystery, with a vague, thin “plot” holding together things like audience karaoke, throwing balls into a cup, and other such nonsense. When the murder finally happened, we were asked to decide whodunnit, before the big reveal that… NO-ONE had done it, because it was all a prank being played on one of the characters in the play and the victim hadn’t actually died. It was truly dreadful, although the accompanying meal was nice which is really the only redeeming factor in this!