56.7 mi / 5:31:22 time /  10.3 mph avg. / 620 ft. climbing

A spatter of rain in the early morning was enough to justify our stay in the motel over the campground to ourselves. First-breakfast was continental at the motel (Cheerios!), and second-breakfast came at a cafe 14 miles down the road. I startled Rett by jumping up when I saw four touring cyclists pass by outside, the first we’d seen all trip. I think we might have finally joined up with Adventure Cycling’s Northern Tier route.

After breakfast, when the coffee/milk/water was putting its maximum pressure on our bladders, we almost missed the fanciest historical public toilet building ever, because who has a fancy historical public toilet building? We saw the 4 Tourers go by again as we stood outside, but they were too fast and far to have chat with.

Most of the day was spent hugging the Lake Erie shore, with a line of properties between the road and the water. Some pretty impressive lakefront houses (and the occasional enormous power plant) drew our gaze, and thankfully we finally had a pretty strong tailwind after few days of headwinds to keep us going forward. Unfortunately that means we returned to the heat of the earlier days as well. Despite the never-ending string of residences, there we almost no commercial properties, so I guess those must be further off the lake. I kept expecting cute lakefront businesses to pop up, but they never did, so we were pleasantly surprised when last-resort lunch at an ugly strip with a big parking lot turned into one of our best so far. $8 lunch specials (sandwiches) at a pretty fancy Italian place, plus an arugula salad (Rett has started craving more veggies).

It took a long time for actual Cleveland to appear, and we entered on a Riverside Rd. whose bridge towered over the river below. Who knew Cleveland had such heights? At least from the west, it’s a  much easier city to enter than Chicago, where the suburbs create a nearly impenetrable barrier to bikes.

After some slightly dodgy areas and some even more-dodgy road surfaces, we hit a section of literally miles of well-kept Victorians just waiting for Dennis to move into them, taking advantage of “the Cleveland Discount” on housing (we later looked at a real-estate office and saw some fairly-decent houses for sale for less than $60k).

We were staying at the Cleveland Hostel in the trendy Market District. Booked some time ago, it was a stop I’d been looking forward to for a long time. Even more exciting was that we arrived exactly on schedule after a week of riding! What a great job by Rett to make it happen!

The hostel, just opened last year, is almost more of a boutique hotel than what you might traditionally think of as a hostel, especially since we got a private room (with a  very clean and modern shared bathroom). Unfortunately we didn’t have time to take advantage of the expansive communal kitchen, or socialize with other guests in the common areas, though we did definitely take advantage of the laundry facilities. Their website said they had bike storage, but what I didn’t know is that there is a discount (10%?) for arriving by bicycle. How cool is that? If I ever stay in Cleveland again, I’ll definitely be going back there.

And the bike-friendly hostel was far from the only thing “Portlandia” about the area. Within  a couple blocks were an award-winning cupcake place, a high-end meat market, a Monster Burrito, and no less than 3 brewpubs! I had originally planned to go to the big one of the three, Great Lakes, but after Rett pointed out the Nano Brew with bikes in the window on our ride in to the hostel, I had to look them up. So check it out: not only do they offer half off your first beer if you bring your bike helmet, they also have an on-street bike box for locking your bike, and best of all, a bike stand and tools inside the bar where you can work on your bike for free while having a beer.

Rett’s kickstand had been coming loose for the past few days and needed to be tightened, but it required a larger hex wrench than I had in my tool kit. So obviously we went to Nano Brew. Funny thing was, while they had the tool I needed, they didn’t have a smaller hex wrench I also needed for the repair, and the fact that I had one in my bag back at the hostel wasn’t any help. Luckily, another bar patron (who I later learned was the proud owner of a week-old Surly Long Haul Trucker) was quick to offer his. We got the kickstand tightened, had some beer, and chatted with a friendly group of mostly computer-programmers. Unfortunately all that dallying meant that Rett’s appetite had dwindled, or she was just reaching her limit of fried food, so she didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did. But it was awesome to hear her discussing local cycling conditions with those guys (“25th St. is the worst!”) as naturally as if she was a grizzled and experienced bike messenger! Hell, the fact that a girl who didn’t know how to ride a bike a year ago can even talk about riding on bad big-city roads in a city not her own, much less on a loaded bike after 50 miles of riding, is pretty ridiculous and amazing.

I don’t know about the rest of it, but from what we saw (and if you ignore the dreadful condition of the roads), much-maligned Cleveland turns out to be a pretty cool city.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2014 at 10:17 pm and is filed under 2014 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.