Adventures and Scars: Cleveland Rocks

We are back from Breckenridge. Those stories to come later.

Our honeymoon journey continued.

On June 7th we took off on a one way flight to Cleveland, OH. While Matt strongly strongly prefers the aisle seat, I made him choose a window seat (Southwest Air) as for us to see the flooding going on along the Missouri River. Note to future city developers: don't build your airport on a flood plain near a river. The day after we left there was going to be a big meeting about the best plan to keep the airport from flooding. To date they have built up the levees. There is currently some standing water on the airport side of the levee, but air traffic continues as normal. Yikes. Back to the main story.

We arrived in Cleveland and picked up the rental car - a silver Hyundai Elantra. We both really liked this car. It got great gas mileage - 37mpg or so. My car gets 21 on a good week. The game was a 7pm game, and being 3pm, we were hungry then. My basic job for this honeymoon was to research where to eat in each city. Our first stop was Melt. I had heard the place is normally PACKED, but going at an odd time to the 2nd, less "cool" location meant we got seated right away. The menus were on old albums. We meant to take pictures of them, but we didn't. Don't worry though because we managed to take pics of our food.

<--My Gyro Melt

<-- Matt’s some sort of Italian melt (cheese sticks & meatballs on there)

Following our orgasmic (I can say that now, I am a doctor and a wife) late lunch we checked in to our hotel: Embassy Suites!!!! I have wanted to stay in one since going to Disney World as a child. We stayed there then, and all I remember was free Shirley Temples in the evening. In fact, my little brother would insist we leave whichever park we were visiting to get back in time for happy hour (imagine a child saying that w/o being able to say his r’s). I don’t remember the free breakfast as much, but being there jogged my memory. I got all our hotels on Priceline and seriously saved big $$$$$. I tried to get all of them relatively close to the stadiums so that we could walk. Pretty much anything within 3 miles is walking distance for Matt & I, but we were closer than that for pretty much all of them. We hit up the manager’s reception for a free G & T before heading to the stadium. We bought cheap bleacher seats and ended up moving a few innings in to a closer seat. We made an awesome sign. I think we have a picture of it somewhere. I will post pictures at the end.

We decided prior to any of the games to get the same exact thing at every stadium (ie mini logo bat, magnet, etc). Being the money savers we are, we went with scorecards. They are only ever $1-2, which fits our budget perfectly. We also walked around the entire stadium to get every free thing we could. In Cleveland, we got a free shirt and umbrella. It was great. Again, being savers, we didn’t buy any food in the stadiums but did drop our jaws at how expensive all the beer was. We already knew that coming in, but it was still impressive. More impressive was the thought of how many people buy beer after beer in the stadium. I have a feeling that even when I am all grown up and making more money, I still won’t want to be spending $30 on beer alone in the stadium. That is so much more beer at home!!!

After the game (Cleveland beat the Twins), we walked back to our hotel via a mile detour to see Lake Erie. The great lakes amaze me. Seeing the ocean a bit growing up, it is easy to forget, when seeing that amount of water, that it really is just a lake. It is even weider when you see gigantic barges on the lake. The next morning we woke up early and hit up the free breakfast. We had a 5 hour drive ahead of us to make an afternoon game in Cincinnati. I love my smart phone because of the “Navigation” on the GMaps. I didn’t have to look up all the directions beforehand!!! Whoop.

MILES TRAVELED DAY 1

Air: 740m

Land: 13m