Trip Report: Cleveland

There’s an old joke about a contest where first prize is a night at a hotel in downtown Cleveland. Second prize (wait for it) is two nights at a hotel in downtown Cleveland. Guess what? My wife and I won third prize in that contest. Two nights in the downtown Cleveland DoubleTree hotel. With two kids. In late November. Eating cheeseburgers in a hotel bar for Thanksgiving dinner.

Spoiler alert: Cleveland rocked.

Like many stories, this one can be blamed on a teen-ager and rock and roll music. The mastermind of this trip was our thirteen-year-old daughter. The one wearing the AC/DC t-shirt with the Rolling Stones poster hanging on her bedroom wall. The one with the iPod loaded with everything from Aerosmith to Zeppelin. The one who discovered that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio, and said “we should totally go there!”

So we totally did. Cleveland is about a seven-hour drive from Washington, D.C., all of it on Interstate (as westerners living in east coast urban exile, still not used to toll roads and sub-85 mph speed limits, but this is the world we’ve chosen). We got up Thanksgiving morning, loaded the SUV, and headed out of town. The kids watching their Grease DVD in the back, mom and dad listening to Tom Petty in the front. The roads were bare but a fresh six inches of snow covered the rolling hills, valley farmlands, and the Alleghany Mountains as we traveled through western Maryland and Pennsylvania. Thanksgiving Day traffic was light. You read that correctly. For the record, that is officially the first time since moving east that I have used the words “traffic” and “light” in the same sentence.

We arrived in Cleveland midafternoon on Thanksgiving. Downtown was dead since most businesses were closed and folks were home enjoying dinner with family. The hotel staff appeared delighted to see somebody, anybody. Service was uniformly friendly and responsive both days of the trip (not the fault of servers, but restaurant was understaffed even for the few guests that were there). The rooms were completely adequate, except sharing a single room and bathroom with four people, but that was our own fault. We took the free hotel shuttle service to the nearby Tower City Center Mall, which, like the rest of downtown was shut down. The exception was those venues – casino and movie theater – that provide the valuable service escape from overexposure to Thanksgiving family togetherness. Since casino security wouldn’t keep an eye on the kids so Carissa and I could hit the blackjack tables, we went to the theater and watched Big Hero 6, an animated Disney movie. I had low expectations but ended up liking the movie a lot. Kids using STEM to kick ass but also learning to exercise restraint! Showing no ability to exercise restraint myself, I shared a Family Sized bucket of buttered popcorn with the six-year-old. By "Family Sized," I mean enough popcorn to feed a mid-sized village. And by "shared" I mean I ate most of it by myself and later felt remorse for my gluttony as well as physical discomfort because the salt on the popcorn caused my lips to swell up to the extent that I felt like the poster child of a botched Botox experiment. Anyway, the movie didn’t suck.

After the movie it was snowing and cold and there were zero restaurants open at the mall or anywhere else in downtown Cleveland on Thanksgiving night. We headed back to the hotel where, fortunately, the bar and grill was open. We were one of three Thanksgiving orphan families scattered around the bar watching NFL football and ordering burgers and sandwiches. 

Friday morning I got up early and went for a run. An early morning run is an excellent way to tour a city when it’s quiet and an even better way to escape the morning rush in a hotel room you are sharing with your wife and two daughters. I did a loop that included the Cleveland Browns’ football stadium and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame building along Lake Erie, then headed uptown past Cavaliers’ basketball arena and the Indians’ baseball stadium near the Cuyahoga River. By the time I got back to the hotel, the rest of the family was up and ready to rock and roll.

The Hall of Fame was open from ten to five the day we visited. Admission was about twenty bucks per person (the six-year-old was admitted free). It’s a pyramid-shaped building with six different levels, including a café and gift shop. The layout was somewhat confusing, but we figured it out. We explored at a leisurely pace, sometimes together and sometimes separately. At one point, Carissa took the six-year-old and spent more than an hour in one of the theaters watching film of induction ceremonies over the years. There were a lot of exhibits of stuff (Beyonce’s dresses, Jimi Hendrix guitar, hand-written Don Everly lyrics, Janis Joplin’s Porsche), iconic photographs (Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Sun Records’ famous 1956 lineup . . . wait what? Avert your gaze kids, there’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers reenacting the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover wearing nothing but socks over there, um, private parts) and video (concert footage, music festivals, vintage performances, theater-quality film so vivid you can see Springsteen sweat through a pair of jeans, whether you wanted to or not).

The Hall of Fame devotes significant space to rock’s early delta blues, gospel, and country roots and influences, my personal favorite part of the experience. My thirteen-year-old daughter listens to classic rock from the 1970s, while I was raised in those same 1970s on my parents’ record collection heavily weighted with 1950s country. At the Hall of Fame, I gravitated to exhibits featuring Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and Lead Belly and Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams while she drifted to the Beatles and Stones. My six-year-old likes anything she can dance to and she found plenty of that. Carissa found the bands that once comprised her teen-aged self’s soundtrack (did someone say Blondie?).

We spent the entire day exploring the Hall of Fame. It had a nice mix of style and substance and I would recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in rock music. As noted, our family has diverse tastes (a post about our music wars is here) but all found plenty to appreciate. We didn’t see much else of Cleveland, but we had no regrets making the Hall of Fame our sole destination. For what it’s worth, the downtown seemed nice and there is probably nightlife somewhere for you free spirits who don’t travel with kids. I’d like to go back in the summer and catch the Mariners playing the Tribe at Progressive Field.

We drove home on Saturday and on Sunday we enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at home. The Hall of Fame trip was such a perfectly timed getaway for the quick Thanksgiving break that we decided should evolve into a new family tradition. An early frontrunner for 2015 is NYC for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I’m still holding out for a Sabres game in Buffalo or Pens game in Pittsburgh to keep the tradition from straying too far from its rust belt industrial city roots. I’m also thinking Toronto or Ottawa because the chances are better we’d find a place to eat on Thanksgiving Day.