The Hamster and the Highway

I was planning to write a lot about our exploits in South Dakota tonight but it’s late and I’ve got a lot of planning (and laundry) to do before I can get some much-needed sleep. So I’ll catch you up on South Dakota tomorrow night.

In the meantime I figured I’d share some of The Hamster’s thoughts on the trip, the sights, and life in general. Unfortunately I’ve only got my netbook with me, which lacks video editing software, so the following videos are all raw footage, but most are just a few seconds long anyway.

As you can see from the videos, by far our biggest point of contention so far has been souvenirs. Anyway, I’ll let Sam do the talking:

1. Sam goes fishing, gets a bite, and then realizes that the fish ate the bait without getting hooked

2. Sam at Niagara Falls

3. Sam complains about my souvenir policy

4. Interview That Guy (with more souvenir complaints)

5. Sam’s friend, Blankie

6. Crown Fountain

7. Chicago weather

8. On the rural scenery seen from the car:

You know what entertains me? Big, beautiful mansions in the middle of nowhere.

9. Interview That Guy, Episode 3 (as you can see, it’s not very easy to conduct an interview, do all the camera work, and drive to Minneapolis all at the same time)

10. On “It’s Not My Time,” by Three Doors Down

I’m pretty sure this song is about Vayeira [the part of the Torah that recounts the destruction of Sodom].

11. Interview That Guy, Episode 4 (The Food)

12. On Badlands National Park

You know what I love about seeing beautiful places? When you’re, like, going up a mountain, and you start seeing a little bit of it, and you see a little more, and a little more, and then you suddenly see the whole thing and you’re like, ‘woah!’

13. At 6:59 am this morning, in his sleep

Oh, you got burned! What now!

Today I came this close to derailing our entire trip. Three times.

On the bright side, the rest stops in Minnesota are now open for business.

OK, we did some fun stuff today. We visited the beautiful Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis, which features an impressive waterfall …

some odd statues …

and the relocated house of the very first civilian settler of Minneapolis.

Sam started using his iPod to make a movie about our trip.

We bought Sam a five-pack of underwear because it was a lot faster and easier than finding a place to do laundry.

We went to the biggest mall in the world, Mall of America, where Sam went on a couple of rides in the Nickelodeon theme park that is literally in the middle of the mall and was blown away by the Lego store.

We stopped briefly in Blue Earth, MN to see a 60-foot fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant (yes, that’s Sam standing between the Giant’s feet).

We sang along to the radio in the car.

We watched the sun set behind a picturesque farm.

But we almost did none of that. My first mistake was not arranging a wakeup call for this morning. I realized this mistake at 9:47 am, when I finally woke up. Somehow we both managed to shower, dress, and repack our bags, our newly restocked and thus overfilled cooler, and our car in time to make our 11 am checkout deadline. But that still put us well behind schedule for a day that was suppsed to put us in South Dakota before nightfall. It’s almost midnight now, and we’re still in Minnesota.

Of course, we’re lucky to even be this far along considering mistake number 2. We were getting close to Blue Earth when I noticed we were getting low on gas. I figured we would fill up in Blue Earth, since we’d be stopping there anyway. But gas there was $3.75 a gallon (expensive for Minnesota) and I had noticed signs for a rest stop only a mile further down I90, so that was my target. The problem: we arrived at that rest stop to find that there was no gas station. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just stop at the next exit. Then my gas light came on. Then the next exit turned out to be 15 miles away. Forunately there was a little sign saying there was a gas station at the exit, though, so I was pretty relieved. At least until I exited and had to drive about a mile to find said gas station. Which was closed. In a panic and having no idea when or where I would find another gas station, I drove very slowly back to the interstate and then all the way back to Blue Earth. Along the way I checked that little thing on my car that tells me how far I can drive on the amount of gas on the tank. It said I had enough gas to drive for 13 miles. Then we passed a sign that said Blue Earth was 12 miles away. There was silence in the car for the next 12 miles. Thankfully we made it to the gas station and I was suddenly thrilled to pay $3.75 a gallon. The car took 15.863 gallons. It has a 16-gallon tank.

Back on the road, we soon stopped for yet another roadside cookout at yet another rest stop, which brings me to gimungous mistake #3. After we ate, repacked the car, and got back on the road, I happened to notice the aroma of the Deep Woods Off that we had sprayed on ourselves to avoid getting bitten up during dinner. I thought to myself that the chicken cutlets I had grilled smelled much better. Longingly, I took a glance at the grill in the back seat of the car, only to notice that IT WASN’T THERE. I had gotten a phone call while I was packing up the car from dinner and somehow that distracted me from realizing that the grill was still sitting in the parking lot next to the car when I drove off. I had no idea what to do. First I slammed on the brakes. Then I realized we were already a few miles away from the rest stop. So I sped up. I contemplated making a U-turn in the grassy ditch between the east and westbound sides of the interstate before realizing that my car would probably end up stuck. I had to drive a couple more miles away from the rest stop before finding a place I could turn around. Eventually we made it back to the rest stop to find the grill still sitting in the parking lot where I had left it. In the meantime, I learned that the road noise increases considerably when my car goes faster than 95 mph.

Sam, in case you’re wondering, was just as freaked out as I was in each situation but was very supportive during each mini-crisis, congratulatory when the problems were ultimately solved, and gently mocking a few minutes later.

OK, time for me to get to bed. We’ve got a lot to screw up do on Friday.

The Hamster and I have had our differences on this trip. Nothing out of the ordinary or unexpected, really: mainly just typical arguments about how much to spend on souvenirs, how often he has to smile for photos, how high to turn the air conditioning, and whether to drive half an hour out of our way to see the world’s largest strawberry.*

Mostly, though, we’ve really been great pals. We’ve become a pretty good team when it comes to unpacking and repacking the car to get in and out of hotels, and we’ve finally come to an understanding about car music, but that’s just the surface stuff; there’s much more to our emerging dynamic. The first few days of our trip was all about the destinations, and it was lots of fun. But we’ve evolved to the point where we’re enjoying each other’s company on a whole new level. We’re cracking each other up. We’re asking each other probing questions. We’re trusting each other’s judgment and yielding to each other’s wishes. We’re commiserating about the heat (99 degrees today, for the record). It almost doesn’t matter where we go next; we’re at a point where we’re just having fun being together, which is good considering that much of the next week or so will be spent in the relative wilderness of South Dakota and Montana.

This morning we packed up the car in record time even after being momentarily slowed by a scraggly 25-year-old pothead’s proselytizing to us as we left our seedy motel. About an hour later we watched as the Minneapolis skyline suddenly rose from the farmland of I35 like Emerald City rose above the poppy field.

[Barely related side note: in an odd trickle-down effect of Minnesota’s budget standoff, all highway rest stops in the state are currently closed. I’m glad to hear they’re finally settling this thing, because I really need to pee.]

Minutes later, we were already parked and on our way into Target Field for a Twins game. The ballpark is beautiful, with thoughtful touches everywhere you turn, and the game was a great one, with the Twins breaking a 4-4 tie in the bottom of the eighth inning and holding on for the win. The heat was brutal and our seats–outstanding seats on any other day–were in full sun for the first six innings, but we managed to enjoy ourselves. I won’t bore you with a lengthy review of the stadium itself except to say that it easily wins the Biggest Improvement Over Previous Stadium award and that the number, placement, and utilization of  scoreboards is on a level above every other sports venue in America.

Despite Target Field being one of the three ballparks I had never visited, the game became as much about the experience as it was about the architecture. We sat, we sweated, we watched the game, we sweated, we talked, we spent lots of money on sodas and helmet sundaes, we sought shade, we savored breezes, we explored, we noticed ballpark features, we found a kosher hot dog stand, we ate hot dogs, we sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we cheered, we laughed as the hero of the game got covered in surprise shaving cream, we left.

The plan was to follow up the game with a short walk over to the supposedly amazing sculpture garden outside the Walker Art Center. But I looked at the map and realized it was a bit further away than I had originally thought, and it was too hot for so much walking. So we skipped ahead and drove to a suburban supermarket to stock up on various food supplies that will hopefully last us until next Friday, when we arrive in Seattle and can once again find kosher food. At the supermarket we again worked as a team, figuring out rough menus, nixing each other’s choices, finding agreement, and jointly mocking the young couple who brought a professional photographer with them to shoot their three toddlers posing with produce.

The next stop was to check into our hotel, a Comfort Suites that got terrible reviews on Trip Advisor but was literally the only place in town with an available room for under $300. I was terrified about what we would find but the place turned out to be fantastic. The decor is horribly dated (circa 1984) but our suite is extremely roomy and even has a bidet, which has been alternately cracking Sam up and blowing his mind. (“Dad! We have a fountain in the bathroom! Come look!”) He also loved the hotel’s inexplicably ornate lobby, which includes both a restaurant and several nicely furnished seating areas:

You know what would be great? If you could spend all day there. You could eat breakfast, then sit, then eat lunch, then sit, and just look at how pretty everything is. Then you’d get bored of looking and go do something interesting.

But the highlight of our day was yet to come: the Torchlight Parade, the culminating event of the yearly weeklong Minneapolis Aquatennial festival. After eating dinner in our suite we walked a few blocks to the parade route, grabbed a few square feet of asphalt, and got a pretty good idea of what passes for entertainment in these parts.

I’d never actually been to a real parade with floats before, and this one was both better and worse than I expected. Despite going through the heart of downtown Minneapolis it had an oddly small-town feel. Most of the floats were sponsored by other upcoming festivals and were ridden by gowned and tiaraed teenagers in full robo-wave. The one featured in the below video was by far the strangest–six preteens (including two awkward boys) dancing enthusiastically and semichoreographedly to a Justin Bieber song while a 40-something woman in a gown waves from the inside of what looks like a well-lit, giant baked potato:

In between floats there were some mediocre high school marching bands, local radio station SUVs with employees handing out logoed giveaways, energy-company/parade-sponsor employees, and the occasional highly entertaining performance from, say, a group of clowns pretending to be a marching band, a breakdancing troupe, a drum corps unaffiliated with any school, or the Twin Cities Unicycle Club. I’m serious–those four groups were easily the best performers of the night.

It was a fun night–at least until about halfway through, when the mother of the kid sitting next to me gave him money to buy a vuvuzela from the souvenir guy. The kid immediately began blowing that horn so incessantly that for the next hour I fantasized about grabbing it from him and shoving it so far up his ass that every time he farted his mother would think she’s at the 2010 World Cup. I mentioned this fantasy to the Hamster, who laughed so hard for so long that I thought I was going to have to carry him home.

I took a million pictures and several short bits of video, but I’ll share just one more: it’s a clip of the unicycle club doing some cool tricks but it’s extra entertaining due to the way Sam heckles the unicycle-riding monkey for the first 30 seconds of the video. Yes, you read that correctly. Enjoy.

He was right, by the way: it was indeed a fake monkey. 

*As per Sam’s decision, we did not go see the giant strawberry.

People will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.

                                                             — Terrence Mann, “Field of Dreams”

 

Chicago is like New York but with lots of fountains. There are massive skyscrapers, a body of water in almost every direction, good public transportation, lots of people moving quickly and purposefully in all directions, gorgeous architecture, huge public parks, two very different baseball teams, massive amounts of traffic, and no place to park. I love this place.

We started the day early so that I could make much-needed use of the hotel’s guest laundry room (I love you, Hampton Inn). Then we drove downtown with four sightseeing destinations in mind:

1) Millenium Park
2) Navy Pier
3) Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower)
4) Grant Park, if time allowed

Despite leaving our suburban hotel after rush hour, we hit our first traffic of the trip. It was oddly refreshing. As much as I enjoyed being practically the only car on the road when we drove through Buffalo and through Cleveland during what should have been the height of morning and evening rush hour, respectively, no city should be that easy to navigate. Chicago’s traffic reminded me that it’s no pushover.

Once in the city, we started at Millenium Park, which did not disappoint. The first thing we bumped into was the relatively new Crown Fountain, comprising two rectangular brick towers about 30 yards apart. Each tower spews water from all sides and features, on the side facing the opposite tower, a giant LED display of a person’s face. The faces change every few minutes, and occasionally appear to spit a huge stream of water from their mouths. Dozens of small children run between the towers screaming while their parents sit on the concrete ledges that surrounds the structure and take pictures.

It was at about this time that we really started to notice the heat. The high today was well into the 90s and the humidity was up around there, too. This is my third time in Chicago and all three times have been on summer days so oppressively hot and humid that you have to wonder how the city ever has winter, let alone the brutal winters it has. With winters and summers that are both worse than New York’s, it’s really a wonder that people here aren’t crankier.

Anyway, we soon moved on to Millenium Park’s other relatively new attraction: a large, highly reflective stainless steel sculpture officially known as Cloud Gate but locally known as The Bean.

On our way out of the park we happened upon a tent set up for the day for “Family Fun” activities. That usually means stuff for little kids, and it did in this case, too: coloring, storytime, but we were just happy to be in the uncomfortably hot shad instead of the unbearably hot sun, so Sam planted himself at an area they had set aside for building blocks and got to work. Fifteen minutes later …

Our next stop was Navy Pier, an over-touristy South Street Seaport-type area but without the working seaport. We decided to walk there. Big mistake. The walk took us through an especially pretty part of downtown Chicago full of extraordinary old buildings and some cool statues. But the heat and humidity were just too much for us. Sam got super cranky, I got super cranky about his crankiness, and the entire day was almost derailed. Stopping briefly in the ATM lobby of a bank for some A/C helped a bit, but by the time we got to Navy Pier we were wiped.

Ahhh, Navy Pier. A Bubba Gump restaurant, a bunch of souvenir shops, an overpriced mini amusement park that includes one of the tallest ferris wheels in the country, lots of cute statues, and thankfully and indoor (air-conditioned) seating area with several cute fountains. Thanks to a nice breeze off the water, we summoned up the energy to walk around a bit, rode the ferris wheel, which provided fantastic views of the city, and sat inside watching the fountains for a good, long time.

The original plan was to try to figure out Chicago’s famous “L” train and take it to the tower formerly known as Sears. We were somewhat refreshed but still exhausted, and Sam was begging for a taxi. I found a solution that gave us both rest and adventure: a water taxi that took us from Navy Pier down the Chicago River and docked a block away from Willis Tower.

I’d been hearing that the John Hancock Center, about a mile north of Willis Tower and almost as tall, has views just as spectacular for less money. But when you’re going coast-to-coast to see as much of the country as you can squeeze into five weeks, you don’t settle for the third-tallest building in Chicago when you can go to the top of the tallest building in the continent.

We had a great time at Willis Tower, which had MUCH shorter lines than the Empire State Building, incredible views despite what had been a cloudy day, air conditioning, and four glassed ledges in which you are physically four feet outside the building suspended 103 stories above street level by nothing but glass.

Back on the ground, we took a walk to the famous Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park (“Chicago’s Front Yard”) before paying a kazillion dollars to get our car out of the underground parking lot and head back to our hotel for the most exciting part of the day: Mommy!

Sarah was in town for business and met up with us to have dinner (Ken’s Diner, the best, quickest, and cheapest kosher food in Chicagoland) and catch a Cubs game.

Sam was thrilled to see his mom, though he soon got irritated that she and I were paying some attention to each other instead of devoting all our attention to him. He got over it, though, and started to enjoy the game.

This was Sarah and my second visit to Wrigley and Sam’s first. He really appreciated Wrigley’s old touches–the vertical support beams holding up the upper deck, the ivy-covered outfield wall–and was especially blown away by watching the hand-operated scoreboard get updated. (Side note: Wrigley Field gets a lot of ink as a beautiful old ballpark, and it is. But what nobody ever mentions is that as beautiful as Wrigley is on the inside it’s just as ugly on the outside.)

The weather was still pretty brutal. But our seats were fantastic (and better yet, free!), Jim Belushi led us in singing the national anthem, the Cubs won, and for one night were were all together again. It was a great day. A very hot, very humid, very great day.

Three states, two time zones, and close to 600 miles. We woke up in Ohio this morning, spend the afternoon in Indiana, and are now safely tucked into bed in Illinois. In between, we saw Touchdown Jesus, bookended by a few smiles. Allow me to explain.

Our main stop today was the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Well, techinically, the campus is its own town (Notre Dame, IN) with its own post office and everything, despite being fully engulfed in South Bend. It’s like the Vatican of Indiana. In more ways than one. But on the way there we made a quick stop in Ashley, IN (population approx. 1,000) to see the water tower pictured above.

Ashley takes great pride in its smiley water tower. It’s pictured prominently on the town’s website, and in fact, the town bills itself as “Home of the Smiley Face.” I like the precociousness there: not Home of the Smiley Face Water Tower–Home of the Smiley Face, period. As if happiness was invented in Ashley, IN. The town’s motto is equally spunky: half of an old poem by an unknown author, with a “sieze the day” message:

The golden opportunity is never offered twice;
Seize the hour when fortune smiles,
And duty points the way.

I doubt I’ll ever move to Indiana, but if I do, Ashley might be a good starting point.

Anyway, next up was South Bend, home to the College Football Hall of Fame (we skipped it–we’re a little Hall-of-Famed out right now), the Studebaker Museum (we skipped that, too), and Notre Dame, which we almost missed. I was rushing to make it in time for the last campus tour of the day, which is at 3pm. What I didn’t realize was that they only have tours on weekdays. Lucky for us, the people who work in the school’s visitors center are from Indiana and not New York, so they happily accommodated us by quickly rustling up a student tour guide just for the two of us.

Holy [insert blasphemous name here], that place is freakin’ Catholic! I mean, I knew it was a Catholic university, but wow! Cathedrals EVERYWHERE. Even the dorms look like cathedrals. Still, as a graduate of Queens College and of LIU Brooklyn, I was blown away by the beauty of the campus, which includes not just gorgeous architecture and perfect landscaping, but even two lakes where students can go swimming, kayaking, and even fishing.

Actual Catholics get excited about the stunning basilica and its gold dome, but the highlights of the tour for both Sam and I were the grotto where Rudy prays to be admitted, the football stadium, and the hunormous stone mural of Jesus directly across from the stadium. In case ya didn’t know, the mural can be seen from inside the stadium, looming over the Notre Dame end zone, and has thus become known as Touchdown Jesus.

Touchdown! Betcha never thought you’d see a giant picture of Jesus on this blog, especially the same day as a post about kosher food.

From Notre Dame we headed to Chicago, with a brief stop near the Indiana-Illinois border for dinner (once again, grilled with love outside a rest stop). Bellies full, we made one more stop in the extremely bad neighborhood of Calumet City, Illinois, where we found what claims to be the first smiling water tower in the country. Like its cousin in Ashley, it, too, wears a bowtie but between its faded color and its blighted location behind the aging parking lot of a trashy mall it’s clear that the tower known locally as Mr. Smiley has seen better days.

About a mile north of Mr. Smiley we ran into our third smiling water tower of the day. It looks exactly the same as Mr. Smiley but with no bowtie. It is reputed to be Mr. Smiley’s estranged wife and still goes by Mrs. Smiley. There’s nothing really feminine about her other than her refusal to wear a bowtie, which I have to assume is what led to their breakup.

Done with the Smileys, we finally made it to Chicago (technically, the Hampton Inn Skokie) for laundry and sleep. Both are very much needed before a big day of sightseeing and baseball in that toddlin’ town tomorrow, plus the most exciting event of all: the arrival of Mommy!

What I liked best about today, though, was the time we spent in the car. We compromised on music and Sam was even tolerant and tried to like most of what I put on. We spent hours talking about very little of real substance and just enjoying each others’ company. The Hamster never once dipped into his bag of car entertainment. More than once, he reached over and affectionately put his hand on my shoulder. With six total hours in the car, today could easily have been unpleasant or much worse. Instead, it was full of smiles.

Keeping kosher is not easy. Not even in New York, where there are dozens of kosher restaurants in every borough and dozens more in the few predominantly Jewish suburbs.

Keeping kosher while traveling is a lot more difficult. The nonkosher don’t know how easy they have it. They can eat anywhere, at any time, and they never have to plan their meals in advance, let alone plan their days around their meals. Whenever they’re hungry, wherever they are, there’s a restaurant of some kind nearby. For us kosher folk, well, not so much. Keeping kosher forces you to be more conscious of everything you put in your mouth, and everything you don’t. You can’t just mindlessly nibble whatever junk you find in that table in the office or being handed out for free in the supermarket; you have to know where it’s from, who made it, what organization (if any) certifies that it’s kosher, and whether that organization is trustworthy. You can never, ever, just pop something in your mouth without thinking about it. There are some major benefits to that mindset, but it sure complicates travel. Food is always the first thing Sarah and I think about when planning any sort of a trip: where we’ll be able to find it, how much of it we’ll need to bring with us, when and where we’ll be able to eat it, etc. We’ve brought entire suitcases full of frozen take-out on trips and even once checked a toaster oven as luggage.

Keeping kosher while traveling across the entire country for five weeks in a car, well, that’s on a whole new level of “not easy.” Living on PB&J and granola bars for a day or two is one thing, but five weeks is a whole different animal. And with no access to a freezer, even the very best cooler on the market only helps for so long. Complicating everything considerably is the fact that I’m traveling with a 9-year-old boy who is generally agreeable but is not necessarily known for his patience or his adventurous palette and is not quite mature enough to suck it up in the name of a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Plus, even when you don’t keep kosher, it’s damn near impossible to eat healthy on the road but I would nonetheless like to include some balance (and vegetables) in our diets. And I’m working with other issues, too. For one, I’m trying to keep food costs as low as possible so that I can afford to sleep in beds instead of in the car. And I also want to pack as light as possible but at the same time limit the amount of shopping we have to do on the road because it takes time away from the fun stuff.

Add it all up and you end up with weeks of planning and shopping and a back seat full of raw and cooked meat, cheese, vegetables, fruit, bread, condiments, cereal, peanut butter, ramen, Parmalat, drinks, snacks, and paper goods. My basic thinking was to bring enough nonperishables to last the entire trip, freeze as much as possible in advance to help it last longer, bring enough perishables to last until we got to Cleveland (our first stop where there are a handful of kosher places), restock for the next few days, continue restocking in every major city, where kosher food tends to be more available, stay in as many hotels/motels that have in-room refrigerators as possible, and above all make sure there’s always something Sam likes to eat.

So far it’s worked perfectly, other than the fact that my back seat–my entire back seat–is loaded to the headrests with the above items. I would even go so far as to say we’ve been eating pretty well. The biggest food-related problem we’ve had so far has been the torturous aromas of the surprisingly robust free treif breakfasts at our hotels, which have included such items as the Travelodge’s waffle maker with ready-made batter and Embassy Suites’ hot french toast and cooked-to-order omelets.

My main concern is for the 8 days immediately after we leave Minneapolis and before we arrive in Seattle. Saying that South Dakota and Montana are not hotbeds of kosher food vastly overstates the amount of kosher food available there. But if we can make it to Seattle without eating each other (or worse, eating at a Waffle House), we should be OK.

In a nutshell, the past 25 hours involved lots of eating, lots of sleeping, lots of reading, and lots of playing, just like every shabbos should. And NO driving, which is good because by this time tomorrow we’ll be two states (and one time zone) away from here.

We had a couple of arguments, the larger of which focused on the long-term benefits of Sam’s letting me continue my afternoon nap vs. the immediate reward of his waking me up and decreeing that I play with him. But for the most part we got along well, and I’m well rested for tomorrow morning’s four-hour drive to South Bend for a tour of the Notre Dame campus and tomorrow evening’s two-hour drive from South Bend to Chicago.

And maybe he’ll even be willing to listen to my music in the car if I tell him the artists are in the R&R Hall of Fame …

This is going to be short, partly because sundown is approaching and partly because there’s just not a whole lot to say.

We had some fun today: a guided tour of Progressive Field, where the Indians play (they’re currently in Baltimore so we couldn’t catch an actual game), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the hotel pool. The best part, though, was that I didn’t even see my car today. Our hotel, the Embassy Suites Cleveland Downtown, is roughly equidistant between both attractions, and within easy walking distance of both, so we walked everywhere today. It was nice to get a tiny bit of exercise, and the weather was a bit overcast and thus not too hot, so it all worked out nicely.

We started with Progressive Field, where our tour was just us and one other small family, so they took us into the visitors’ clubhouse, which they don’t normally do. The tour was a bit short and cursory by ballpark tour standards (I’ve taken five or six of these by now), but I’d never been in a team clubhouse before, so that was pretty cool.

The Hamster was as amazed as I was. He was wowed by the huge leather sectional and the 52-inch TV and the XBox, but i was more impressed with the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which we were told is there because some of the players grew up playing it and thus like it better than the XBox.

Another particularly cool part of the tour was the indoor batting cages. There were two regular cages and two that blew me away. One was a computerized pitching machine for which the batting coach can enter an opposing pitcher and a sequence and then video of that pitcher throwing those pitches will be shown on a giant screen on the pitcher’s mound while the ball comes flying out of a hole in the screen. The last cage had a tennis ball cannon, which was not too exciting except that our tour guide showed us these:

The batters are supposed to not only hit the ball but also identify the number drawn on the ball and the color of the ink used to draw it. At 95 mph.

Anyway, after the stadium tour we walked back to the hotel, ate cold cuts for lunch, and then headed to the Rock Hall, as the locals call it. On the way we bumped into the giant FREE stamp in front of city hall.

That’s The Hamster standing under the crook of the stamp handle, in case you can’t tell.

The Rock Hall itself, our third hall of fame in four days, was a big disappointment. But that wasn’t the Hall’s fault. I think Sam was just a bit too young for it. I’ve already mentioned his deplorable, commercialized taste in music, and since Jason Derulo and Justin Bieber and whoever sings that annoying Hamster Dance song aren’t enshrined in the Hall, Sam didn’t recognize 99% of the artists and thus was uninterested in just about every exhibit and rushed me through the whole seven-story building in about an hour. It’s too bad, because I would have enjoyed spending a little more time there and looking at some of the stuff for which he had no appreciation. We did, once again, linger in the part of the building where all the inductees are honored. It was done in a very unusual and cool way: a circular theater played a short movie composed of clips of performances from and/or interviews with all the inductees, organized by year of induction. Circling the theater concentrically was a narrow, ramped corridor that was completely dark. One wall of this dark corridor (the outer one) was covered in glass or some glass-like substance, into which the signatures of every inductee were etched and backlighted, so that the only light in this rounded corridor was from the signatures of the inductees. And rather than being organized by year of induction they were organized alphabetically, so it was super easy to find anyone we were interested in. Photos are not allowed in most of the museum but I snuck a few anyway.

Next to the Rock Hall is the Science Center, a kids’ science museum that has been recommended to us by many people. But after checking it out online The Hamster and I decided he might be a little old for it, and we can always go to the excellent science museum in Queens. So we headed back to the hotel, changed, and went swimming in the hotel’s indoor pool. It was a lot of fun but I found myself looking longingly at the well-stocked fitness center in the next room. I’m determined to get some actual excercise on this trip, but I have yet to figure out when to squeeze it in without abandoning or boring Sam.

This is my second trip to Cleveland, and my overall impression of the city is that it’s clean and pretty but oddly empty of both people and cars, even downtown, and even during rush hour.

Sundown approaches. Tomorrow night I hope to post an explanation of what we’ve been doing for food. See you then.

Two of the side goals of this trip are for Sam to learn to do more things for himself and for me to learn to let go. So today I put Sam in the driver’s seat. Not literally, because that would be against the law. And certain death. I mean I let him call a lot of the shots. His first decision: going swimming in the motel’s outdoor pool before we checked out. So we did.

And then we started the three-hour drive to Canton, OH, during which Sam controlled the music. Let’s just say instead of putting music on his iPod he can save himself some cash by just taping an hour of New York’s 92.3 NOW. By far the best song that came on during the entire ride was “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” by Tracey Morgan/Jordan. He likes my music even less than I like his, though, which means that what we listen to in the car will be a continued point of contention for the next 33 days.

On the plus side, we drove straight through without stopping even once. One of the nicest things about an all-male road trip is how infrequently we need to stop for bathroom breaks. I should stop calling this kid Hamster and start calling him Camel.

We ate a quick lunch in the parking lot of the Pro Football Hall of Fame before going inside. Camel has only really started getting into football in the past year or so, so instead of dragging him through exhibits about players he’d never heard of, I let him lead. When he was interested in something, we stopped and looked; when he wasn’t, we didn’t. The only time I insisted on lingering was in the hall itself, which is starkly different from baseball’s hall.

Each inductee is represented by a life-sized bust that’s lit from underneath with no information but his name, his position, and the team(s) he played for. Other than each bust’s lighting, the room is dark, giving it a somber, hallowed feel. I was blown away by how true-to-life the busts are–I was able to recognize several of the players without looking at their names. There’s also a cool interactive feature where you can look up any inductee by name or by team, get information about them, and find out exactly where in the enormous room to find his bust. Unfortunately, I can’t share my pictures of any of this because I took several nice shots but then stupidly left the camera in my car when I parked it for the night a couple of hours ago.

After Canton we headed to Cleveland, checked into our hotel, got settled, did a bit of research on the kosher restaurants in the area, and then went out for dinner. It was nice to finally eat a hot meal that wasn’t cooked by me on the side of an interstate highway.

We crossed a lot of land today (we’re up to almost 900 miles in total), but we didn’t actually do very much. I think that was a good thing after the whirlwind of the first two days of our trip. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. My leg and back are sore and stiff from all the driving, and my head is spinning from trying to remember what day it is, what state I’m in, and where I’m going next. But now we’re staying put for a couple of days.

From tonight through Sunday morning, we’re staying in downtown Cleveland at a “real” hotel – an Embassy Suites with valet parking, a gym, and an indoor pool that I expect we’ll get a lot of use out of, but without the free wifi they promised me when I made the reservation. (Don’t worry, I argued and got them to comp the wifi after all.) Tomorrow we walk from our hotel to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (our third HOF in four days), take a tour of Jacobs Progressive Field, and probably do some more swimming. That’s about all that’s on the schedule for the next two days, although at some point Sam will have to finish watching “Rudy” because we’ll be in South Bend by lunchtime on Sunday, and (say it with me) “nobody–nobody–comes into our house and pushes us around.”

I just hope it’s my turn to control the radio on the way there.