Cleveland

Josh and I were trying to figure out a good place to go for a short "mini-vacation" and he said "How about Cleveland?" We'd been there once before, but only on a drive through on our way home from Niagara Falls on our Honeymoon. Cleveland is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Josh loves and wanted to visit again. So I agreed...it's only a 2 and a half hour drive from our house after all.

When we arrived, we ate dinner at the Hard Rock- One of Josh's favorite places to eat-- we've been to 16 of them, including the original in London, where Josh got to hold Jimi Hendrix' "Flying V" guitar- a highlight of our European Vacation for him. Then we walked back to our centrally located hotel and went to bed (we didn't get to leave until we were both off work on Friday).


Saturday morning, we drove to the Westside market- a place I discovered on Foodnetwork.com. It's a great little market with a huge row of produce stands on the outside, and on the inside there are little booths that specialize in everything from Meat to Baked Goods to Pickles. Josh had a chocolate bear claw from one of the bakery booths and I choose a Crepe- a Chocolate and Strawberry crepe, which we decided was as good if not better than the ones in France.




While we were having these things, Liam was just having a good time (see below).



Another Major Cleveland Atraction is this house...look familiar? It's the house from the movie "A Christmas Story"...you know, the one with Ralphie and the Red Ryder BB Gun? The Leg Lamp? This is one of Josh's all time favorite Christmas movies, so we thought we would go take a look at the museum and the house. It was in interesting place, where you can have a leg lamp shipped to your house in a crate just like the one from the movie.


Here is our photo at the house with a leg lamp in the front window-- not the origninal leg lamp- as you'll recall it was broken in the movie.

After the Christmas Story house, the plan was to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it turned out that they were having a breast cancer walk and downtown was nearly impossible to drive through. We decided instead to go to B.A. Sweetie candy store- the world's largest I believe- and take a stroll through the sweet sweet isles. We only bought things that we couldn't find in every store- things like Jordan Almonds, Crybaby Gumballs, Slo Pokes, and these interesting Jelly Beans....

They are called Bamboozled by Jelly Belly. There are "matching" flavors of Jelly Beans. For example, there are two flavors that are yellow. They look AND smell exactly the same, but one of them is banana flavored, and the other is Ear Wax. The purple ones are either Plumb or Black Pepper, and the list goes on and on. Needless to say, we dug into these on the way home and made it into a little game. We ate the same color at the same time to see who got what. I must say that the Black "Skunk Spray" flavored ones were absolutely horrendus! They actually made me cry!

Our final stop on our trip was to Malley's chocolates- another place that I had seen on the Food Network- Rachel Ray's Tasty Travels. They have great chocolate! We bought a small box and a candy bar to split on the way home-- to get the booger flavored Jelly bean flavors out of our mouths.

All in all, a fun little trip!