Day Thirteen

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming. It was, after all, Day (Unlucky) Thirteen. First off, when I woke up this morning, my head was in a fog, and I was slow to get moving. I ended up leaving the hotel when my schedule said to, but as I got to bed early the night before, I had hoped to leave ahead of schedule. First on the agenda was Cleveland, Ohio, and the drive went SLOW! The stop lights are not timed well in downtown Cleveland, and I got caught by a lot of reds. (Now in comparison to Chicago, Cleveland was great in the way of traffic density and ease of getting around. So in that regard, Cleveland, you rock!) By the time I hit my lunch stopover in Erie, Pennsylvania, I was an hour behind schedule. But instead of getting something fast, I went with my original plan and went downtown to an Irish pub called Molly Brannigan's. If you are ever in Erie, check it out, its a great place with a good selection of Irish dishes. What I did skip was a planned visit to Presque Isle State Park in Erie. It is a park that juts out from the state proper into Lake Erie. I thought it would be a great site for photos, but with time being a factor, I eschewed it for a better chance at getting to Niagara Falls. With that, it was back on the road, on my way into New York state. At this time, it started to rain cats and dogs (and maybe even some cows and horses too). So driving went slowly again, and got worse when I hit a patch of road construction just south of Buffalo. All in all, I had lost another hour. What was supposed to be a total of 5 and a half hours of driving had turned into almost 7 and a half. But the skies had started to clear, so I was hoping to shake off the malaise of the day with the visit to the Falls. The hotel (in an area called Tonawanda, NY) was on the way, so I stopped by, checked in, and hopped on the wifi to check out the weather radar. The prognosis was not good. More storms had started to develop, and by the time I would have reached the park, they would have been on top of me. Lightning had been sighted in association with said storms, and rain doesn't really do any good to a camera. So what am I left with? Well, at the very least, I got from Point A to Point B safely. So that's something. Didn't really get any quality photos today, as my two main subjects were scrapped, but I'll share the ones of which I did get that I enjoy. And while I'm upset to miss the Falls, I'm sure I'll be back here sometime later in my life. I wouldn't have made it over to the Canada side on this trip, so I probably would have needed to come back anyways. (This is me trying to stay positive. Maybe it's working?) Tomorrow will make up for it, though. Every baseball fan's mecca is on the agenda: Cooperstown, the Baseball Hall of Fame! And I've heard the drive across the state is a gorgeous one. So I'll rid myself of this unlucky 13 nonsense, and get back at it tomorrow. See you then!