Cleveland, Ohio- Monday, Feb. 20, 2017

     We looked at a couple of options for a place to go over February break this year.  We considered some warmer climates, but we are kinda saving for the big summer trip that we've got coming up.  So we considered some closer places, and finally settled on a night in Cleveland.   Anna and Emma opted not to come with us this time.  They were both looking forward to having a night at home by themselves.  Anna has her hands full with the puppy, Winfield, that we brought home earlier this week, and Emma was happy to just not leave the house.  They both couldn't wait for us to leave. So it ended up being just Julie and Scott for this trip.
    We started driving this morning and made it to Cleveland before noon.  Our first stop here was the Rock and Roll  Hall of Fame.  It's been here in Cleveland for quite a while, but we've never taken the time to visit it before now.  Scott had enjoyed the Country Music Hall of Fame so much in Nashville that he had high hopes for what we might see here.
     The Rock Hall covers a much broader slice of music than the Country Hall of Fame did, so when you include early influences from jazz, country, blues and gospel, and follow that all the way through Motown and punk and heavy metal and rap to today's music, there's quit a bit of ground to cover.  Perhaps inevitably, most of the artifacts on display were about people that we didn't care that much about.   But even so, there are quite a few gems.  Scott's attention was first attracted by clothes from Hank Williams as one of those "Early Influences."  Julie got a picture taken by one of Elvis's gold lame suits.   Scott was very impressed by an entire wall of Beatles' artifacts, which included John Lennon's manuscript for the lyrics for "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and a lot of recognizable clothes.   He was very disappointed to learn that the uniform that John wore on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is no longer on display here.  He had been looking forward to getting a picture taken with that.  There was a rather large display of artifacts from Johnny Cash, perhaps surprisingly.  They were playing the video for "Hurt" on a continuous reel, which may have been an interesting and poignant song artistically, it really doesn't represent his entire body of work very well.
     Julie's favorite part of the Rock Hall was a video that looked at Dick Clark and the many performers that he had on American Bandstand.  We came in at the end of it, but sat through it again in order to see them all.  There was a 3-D movie a U2 concert, which had some interesting effects, but neither one of us is really a U2 fan.  Anna wanted us to gets some pictures of some things from people she'd recognize, so we got one of a Lady Gaga "dress" (that looked more like a model for the planet Saturn), dress from Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, and some clothes from Fall Out Boy.
     After a few hour here, we were satisfied that we had seen all that we could.  Scott had thought that there would be an actual hall of fame, like at Cooperstown, Canton, and Nashville, with plaques of the inductees, but apparently there is not.  Scott bought two large books in the gift shop- one on the first 25 years of the Rock Hall of Fame, and one on the Beatles, and we went to our next stop.
     We found the brew pub for Great Lakes Brewing, not very far away.  (We didn't know that it was so close to the West End Market, or we would have planned some time in to go to that too.)  We've enjoyed going to different brew pubs in Buffalo over the last few months, so we thought we'd give this one a try.  We were not disappointed.   Normally a "flight" of beers has about 4 or 5 samples on it to try, but the one Scott got here had 10!  He's had a few of these before because Great Lakes are sold in our area too.  We also got some pretzels and sausages to hold us over until dinner.  We'd give this brewpub a 9, maybe 10, out of 10.
     We had contacted Scott's cousin Laurie last night to see if we could get together for dinner.  We met her at the Applebee's by the Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted.  It was fun getting a chance to talk to her.  After dinner we went to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Gene's house and sat in their living room talking with them until 9:00.  Scott always thinks its fun to revisit here because he has so many memories of visiting here when he was growing up.  We then went to our hotel which is right next to the Great Northern Mall too.