Shores of Lake Erie, Northeast Ohio- Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2017

     We slept in and left our hotel in North Olmsted with the plan to take our time and follow the Lake Erie shore for much of the way home.  The first little site we stopped at was Bradstreet's Landing.  We didn't realize until we looked it up as we were driving away, but this was the site where British Colonel John Bradstreet had met a disaster in 1764 enroute from Fort Detroit to Fort Niagara.  We admired many of the large expensive houses in this area as we made our way along the lake shore.   We found Edgewater Park with a great view of the skyline of Cleveland with two large snowmen and the word "Cleveland" evidently placed just to help people take a postcard-style photograph.  A large statue of the composer Richard Wagner gazed out towards the city, and had been placed there by German immigrants a century ago.
     The GPS in the phone helped us find the Greater Cleveland Aquarium, which was our first planned stop  for the day.  It's in a re-purposed old power building.  The aquarium is a smaller one, but we both thought it was nice.   We liked the turtles and the seahorses.  Julie touched one of the rays as they swam buy.  We watched a diver in the shark tank feeding lettuce to the "smaller" fish in there with him.  We had lunch in the cafe that was in the same building.
     We then explored the area called "The Flats" around the Cuyahoga River, where Cleveland began.  We saw a log cabin in a park under the bridge, which seemed to represent one built by Moses Cleveland or one of the other early settlers in that area.  We also found Cleveland's monument to the Irish Famine victims, underneath the bridge nearby.  Like much of Cleveland, the area seems to be being revitalized.
     We drove east out of downtown, past the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that we visited yesterday.  Julie spotted a Ohio historical marker that marked the "Birthplace of Superman."  Both Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster who created Superman back in the 1930s were from Cleveland.  A few blocks away, we found the "House that Superman was born in," which was where Jerry Seigel lived.  It was 65 degrees out today, and someone was working in the front yard, so in spite of all the signs out, we didn't stop for pictures there.
     We drove on, winding our way slowly through northeast Ohio, sometimes closer to the lake than other times, but generally heading east.  Julie wanted to find lighthouses.  We saw one at a restaurant called Pickle Bill's Lobster House, but we couldn't tell if it was a "real" one or not.  Further down the road, we found a really nice old one at Fairport Harbor.  It had what looked like a cute looking museum in the lighthouse keeper's home, but the museum wasn't open today.
     We had found the signs for the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail and were following those by now, but it was after 3:00, and we decided just to follow Route 20, and soon even abandoned that route and got back in I-90, about 50 miles east of Cleveland.  We zipped through Pennsylvania in order to stop at a brewery in Westfield, New York, where Scott had wanted to stop to get a "stamp and sticker" in his book of Western New York breweries.  Five and 20 Spirits and Brewery was a nice tasting room for beer, wine, and even distilled spirits made there, but it wasn't a "brewpub" and didn't have a menu.  We were the only ones there, at about 5:00 on a Tuesday night.  Scott got a flight to sample some of the beers, but we didn't stay long.  We made our way home to see the girls and the dogs and ate dinner with them.