Road Trip Diaries

Today can be summed up very quickly:

1. Eat red meat based meal until we could barely waddle back to the car
2. Drive through Northern Ohio (6 hours)
3. See (1)

Here’s the slightly longer version.

For once we got up quite late. We knew there was a Steak ‘n’ Shake nearby, and this is Debbie’s favourite American restaurant chain, so we decided to skip breakfast and have an early lunch there.

We drove to Ashtabula, and found the Steak ‘n’ Shake by 11:30. We’d planned to explore Ashtabula to kill some time, but it was raining, so instead we killed time at the nearby Walmart. Ashtabula has quite some Walmart. If you stand at one end, the other end actually curves over the horizon…

At the Whaling museum in New Bedford, we had seen an exhibit of some whalebone pastry crust crimpers, which were annotated along the lines of "Nowadays we think of pies as having sweet fillings, but in the 19th century it was common to serve meat in a pie as a main course". Could it really be true, we wondered? Is the meat pie an alien concept in modern America?

We decided to check Walmart’s freezers. Beef , turkey and chicken pies were in plentiful supply, so we don’t know what the whaling museum was on about.

We also admired the Coke shelf. Bear in mind, Ashtabula is not famous for its wall of Coke. This is simply the range available.

Having availed ourselves of the snack, DVD, clothing and luggage areas, and picked up a TV guide for the week ahead, it was a respectable time for lunch, and we were weak with hunger.

That didn’t last long. The Steak ‘n’ Shake saw us right.  A burger each, two side orders (because that’s the deal), and a huge milkshake each (because that’s the name of the establishment). As I hinted before, we waddled back to the car.

Then, we drove. For the most part we stayed on US-20, but we used Interstates to get through/around Cleveland — which mostly worked, apart from some crawling in a traffic jam caused by a crash.

Past Cleveland, there was lots of  flat, straight road — and lots of cornfields. Also, there was a lot of rain. Water has been a bit of a theme this holiday.

We intended to stay in Toledo, which apparently has lots of motels. We passed a Holiday Inn and a Day’s Inn, but passed them by. We passed through Toledo on US-20 and Alt-20 without seeing another motel, and stayed on Alt-20 into Wauseon, which seemed like a nice little town, but didn’t seem to have a motel.

We gave up and decided to head for the Interstate toll road, where there would be chain motels. Sure enough, there was a cluster just on the interchange, and as prophesised in yesterday’s diary, we checked into the Super 8. It looks as if we’ve started on the "cheap hotels" portion of our holiday, which is a good thing.

The Super 8 is pretty generic, but it has an interesting roof…

We walked to Smith’s Restaurant next door, where we both had steak, and had to waddle back to the motel.

Sunday night is a Fox night. Simpsons, Princes of Malibu, Family Guy. It passes the time while fending off a stomach ache.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 17th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Oregon Trail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.