Travelling Hopefully - The Mistake by the Lake

I arrived in Cleveland at 5.30 in the morning in the pouring rain.  It was dark, wet and apparently devoid of life.  To be fair it was 5.30 on a Sunday morning.  I should have been grateful that the Amtrak station was open.  A little over an hour later it wasn't, apparently Cleveland Amtrak station is run by vampires because it's only open at night.  Cast into the outer darkness I trudged wearily towards the local public transport centre guided only by the incredibly helpful tourist maps that decorate pretty much every corner of Downtown.  So good were they that I found it impossible to get lost and turned up at the hotel without a hitch. The hitch came when I got to the hotel, it looked abandoned.  Fortunately it was just under renovation although services were a bit limited and by limited I mean close to non existent.  Still the bed was comfy which was the main thing.  I wandered up to the conference room where the gaming was taking place and essentially forgot about Cleveland for the next seven days.

When the gaming was done though I took advantage of a sunny day to catch the train into the heart of the city.  Accompanied by fellow Australian Aaron Cleavin (Aaron is actually from New Zealand but I was on holiday and minded to be generous to the colonies) I headed lakeside to check out the Great Lakes Science Center.  The Science Center is a museum dedicated to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) and provides an educational tour for visiting school kids.  It also houses NASA's Glenn Visitors Center and is the entry point for visiting the steamship William G Mather which is moored outside.  The William G Mather is known as "The Ship That Built Cleveland" due to its frequent trips carting ore for the Cleveland steel mills.

I got all the above information from Wikipedia incidentally because it turned out there was a minor issue with visiting the centre itself.  Just across the road from the centre is FirstEnergy Stadium also known as "The Factory of Sadness" which is the home ground of the Cleveland Browns NFL team.  A sign on the door of the Science Center announced that the Browns were playing a home game that day (they lost) and as such the centre was closed.  I mean science, technology, engineering and math are important in their own way but the Browns are playing goddammit.

Why the Science Center needed to be closed for a football match wasn't fully explained by the sign.  Perhaps all of the staff were at the game or maybe the city fathers felt Cleveland could handle the excitement of a football match or the Science Center but not both.  Possibly the police (as represented by several overweight officers testing the load bearing capacity of some slightly desperate looking horses) were afraid that the combination of disappointed Browns fans (their natural state) and rampaging science nerds was more than they could handle without support from the National Guard.

Whatever the reason the centre was closed and we had to make do with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame which apparently wasn't considered exciting enough to close during a Browns game.  The hall of fame must be absolutely fascinating to people who are fascinated by such things.  It turns out I'm not one of them.  The most interesting parts detailed the history of and influences on rock and roll from the very early days to the fifties.  Plus of course recordings of various artists including film of Elvis in his prime doing what he did best (bingeing on tranquillisers and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the truckload).  For the rest it looked like every rockstar in history had had a combined garage sale and kerbside trash pickup and the results had been placed behind glass in Cleveland.

After exhausting the possibilities for rock and roll based fun (I looked for the drugs and groupies exhibit but couldn't find it) we made our way through a sea of disappointed Browns fans and some suicidally cheerful Patriots supporters to an Irish pub where I ordered Irish antipasta partly because it was the only thing on the menu not made with Guinness and partly out of sheer curiosity.