Beavers and Bunnies oh my

Sorry to disappoint today, but I fear today was a dull one. It was rainy and we got up late. The sleep was needed. After much debate we decided to just amble around.

Our first stop was the neighborhood described as Ohio’s Haight-Ashbury. The road signs were tye-dyed. But way cooler than that, the trees of the neighborhood all had metal fences around them, little wrought iron vignettes. Dancers, birds in trees, two fighting over a car accident, a piano player and singer, and my fav - beavers! Complete with beaver dam!

The stores were okay. A new age-y book store. A eastern Asia import (same old stuff, if you know the sort of things.) The retro store - lots of plastic toys, bumper stickers I don’t really have enough nerve to put on my car, gag gifts and lots of action figures. If you frequent this kind of place - you know the stock here too. There was also a cat store - but it mostly catered to dogs. The nerve. (Do you know how hard it is to find good cat toys?) And some junk/antique shops in which we splurged. M. got an old radio for school. Long story there. And I got cast iron bunny bookends. I’m very pleased. We think we’ll actually use them as door stops because Miss Lulu likes to sneak into closets and then gets locked in.

We left there to see the West Side Market. Unfortunately, it was not open today. Though it did give us a enough of an impression that we know what it is about. Next door we stopped for lunch at a Turkish place. We got the appetizer platter(babaganoush, humus, taboli, grape leaves, +) - more food than we could possibly eat and it was wonderful.

M. and I both agree, much to our surprise, Cleveland is a good food city and we’d come back to eat more! But eat we have, we were stuffed. So much so, in fact, that dinner tonight we just grabbed some grapes and cheese from the nearby Whole Foods and had a picnic.

The West End was supposed to be the “antique” district too, so we drove a bit. There were stores, though nothing that looked worth stopping in and the neighborhood was growing progressively bad. We did get some pictures of community gardens though, another school thing for M.
Retracing our steps we went back to downtown and found another little shop area. This one though was boring. So after another brief walk, we returned to our room and crash. Tomorrow we will head out and up toward Erie, PA turning towards home. We don’t really have a plan at this point, but really, how far can we go and I don’t think we can even get lost in New York. It’s a big state, but its still our back yard.