Rock and Roll

August is coming to a close, and school starts tomorrow. I managed to pack some fun into my short summer, though. My travels in June and July meant that new things were easy to come by, but I managed to do a new thing or two in August, too. The same weekend I went to Cedar Point with my friend Jen and the boys, we traveled across the "north coast" to Cleveland and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The R&R Hall of Fame is 150,000 square feet of rock and roll: seven floors of exhibits, interactive music stations, several movie theaters, a cafe, and a gift shop. The building itself is pretty cool--lots of interesting angles, glass, and metal, and a wonderful view of Lake Erie.



Here's the view from the cafe balcony:


I enjoyed the building as much as the exhibits. Here are some shots of them quirky insides of the place:












I think my favorite part of the museum was the inductees movie theater, with continually running film clips of interviews and music videos by their 279 inductees. The theater is loud and rocking, as it should be, and it gives you a dynamic and really fun glimpse or R&R's greatest artists.

The museum was worth a trip north, and given that we only managed to see three floors, I have a lot more to explore at some point.

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Amusement Parks

When I was a kid, one of the most exciting days of the year was school picnic day. On the last day, all of Holy Rosary School--and every other parochial grade school in Erie--showed up at Waldameer Park. Waldameer is the tenth oldest amusement park in the US. It opened in 1896, and it's still going today. The park features a number of rides that weren't there when I was a child, including The Ravine Flyer, an updated remake of a wooden coaster that was torn down in the late 30s when some over-exuberant rider stood up as the car was crossing the ravine and fell to his death. The new Ravine Flyer is supposed to be an excellent roller coaster--it even won the Best New Ride of 2008 award from Amusement Today Magazine!

I loved Waldameer, but there were other parks in the area, too. Conneaut Lake Park featured the Blue Streak, a wooden coaster that scared me: I rode it twice, and that was enough. When I was 15, my parents took my sister, Jane, and I to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. It was a drizzly day, so we alternately rode rides and sought shelter. I don't remember going on any coasters that day, but I do remember a few thrilling rides from my one visit to that big park. Last Saturday, I went back. My friend, Jen, her 12-year-old son, Joe, and his friend, Will, and I went to Sandusky on Friday night, and spent the day at Cedar Point on Saturday. The boys loved it, and they pronounced every ride they went on "the best ride ever." Their favorite was the coaster called the Millennium Force. Here's the description from the park website:
"It’s the big star of the show. A true Giant among coasters. So huge, it created a whole new category – the giga-coaster. Welcome to Millennium Force, the 310 foot, 93 MPH record-breaking monster of a thrill ride. The first hill features an elevator cable lift system to get you to the top faster, then it’s an 80-degree drop to start the coaster ride of your life!" here it is as it whizzed by us.



Joe and Will loved it. Here they are as they walked off the ride.


Here they are, looking proud of their thrill ride bravery:



Jen and I spent most of our day sitting around, gabbing and waiting for the boys to return from one ride or another.



I did conjure up a little unnecessary courage to ride the Ferris Wheel with the boys. It looks right out over lovely Lake Erie, by the way.



Goofing around on the wheel:


My lake:


An arial view of the park:


One nice thing about the park is that it has its own beach, so once the boys were done riding, we wandered along the lakeshore for awhile.



Here I am with a teeny tiny little Jen on my shoulder. Oh, the joys of bad photography!


It was both of the boy's first visit to a Great Lake, and I think they enjoyed it. Too bad it was too chilly to swim--though it didn't keep them from wading.





Waldameer will always be my favorite amusement park, but I enjoyed my trip to Cedar Point, and so did my traveling companions--especially the 12-year-old ones.

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Horseshoe Pond

Semester conversion at the university is spiraling down to its inevitable conclusion: the start of our first fall semester in a few short weeks. My summer has been unusually short between study abroad on the front end and fall semester on the other. Nevertheless, I've managed to pack in Scandinavia, a little gardening, some time with friends, and, now, a little visit to Erie. Our annual family picnic was on Sunday, so I went up a few days early for a visit.

The other night, my sister, Jane, and I took her son, Mike, to his karate class picnic out at Presque Isle State Park. While Mike ran around with his friends and Jane chatted with some of the other Karate parents, I roamed around the area near Water Works beach. I've written about the peninsula before: it's the real star of my hometown, and one of my favorite places. Its central feature is a seven-mile stretch of Lake Erie sand beaches, but that's not all it has to offer. While the beaches are on one side of the peninsula, the sparkling bay is on the other side. There's a lagoon--once a series of isolated ponds that were connected by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s--there are several wooded hiking trails, a couple of lighthouses, and birding opportunities aplenty. There are also a bunch of houseboats, and that's where my walk led me the other night.

I've always been drawn to the houseboats on Horseshoe Pond. There are only twenty something of them, and when I was a kid, they always looked like playhouses out on the water: I guess that's kind of what they are. They're all privately owned summer houses, and the backyard is fabulous: the whole peninsula! If you scroll down a bit in this article, you'll find a piece about one of the houseboats.
http://www.lakeerieliving.com/Main/Articles/Uncommon_Cottages_629.

I walked past the houseboats to the North Pier Lighthouse and back again, and as I got to Horseshoe Pond on my return trip, I saw a big Caddy pull up. I noticed the New York license plates right away as it pulled into the dirt parking lot near the pond. The window rolled down, and a dark-haired middle-aged woman leaned her head out of the window and shouted to me, "Hey! Do you live here?" I thought she meant the houseboats, so I said, "No! I wish!" "YOU wish? she asked, sounding incredulous. "I'm from New York City!" It was then that I realized that she was really asking me if I lived in Erie, and it was clear that, for her, the Big Apple had nothing on the Gem City. I grew up wanting to leave Erie. I guess lots of kids want to leave their hometowns, especially small towns, imagining life is more interesting elsewhere--especially if that elsewhere is NYC. I guess I agreed with Erie's "mistake on the Lake" nickname back then, though it didn't take me long to miss it and wish I could move back.

The dark-haired woman climbed out of the Cadillac and continued shouting to me as I walked by. "Where do you live?" she hollered after me. I told her and she yelled, "What's your tax rate?" I told her it was 6.5% and she one-upped that by shouting back, "Oh my God! Ours is 8.8%!" As I walked back towards the picnic shelter, I heard her shouting across the pond to a houseboat dweller, "Hey mister, are these for rent or privately owned?" I could almost imagine her disappointment when the shout came back across Horseshoe Pond: "Privately owned--all of them." This woman might not make a peninsula houseboat her summer home, but she certainly didn't see Erie as any kind of "mistake." She'd found on Presque Isle what I find on every return trip home: the gem in the Gem City.



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