Thursday: The Travelingest Day of the Week

We did our best (details below), but Thursday became the first day without baseball on the trip. The plan was to head to Cincinnati from Chicago, but after running a JF family errand north of the city, which we finished with around 2:00 Eastern time (one of the hurdles was losing an hour going from Chicago to Cincinnati), we headed back south to find crippling traffic. By the time we got through Chi-town, it was 3:30 (EST), and making a 7:20 game in Cincinnati wasn't going to happen.

We headed east towards Cleveland, thinking we'd stop in Toledo on the way to see if a minor league game was scheduled. We pulled in around 7:20, and the town's stadium was quiet. They call their park Fifth Third Field, and neither of us can figure out why they didn't just name it Fifteenth Field.

Amherst, Ohio, was our home for the night, about 30 miles west of Cleveland. We stayed at a Days Inn (the last hotel of the trip) and managed to watch some of the Pistons-Spurs game before passing out. With about nine hours of road time, including the travel around Chicago, it was an exhausting day. The rural parts of Ohio again impressed us with their beauty, but the state can't seem to get its cities right. Toledo, like every other city in the state, is neither big enough to seem like much fun nor small enough to be quaint and inviting. We've come up with a new state motto for Ohio: "Ohio." --JW