As Aimee and I became friends during my first months in Boston, we discovered a mutual love of baseball and road trips. At the end of my first year in town, in the summer of 2001, we took off on a baseball road trip; Aimee was on school vacation, and I was, in a way, having been laid off in the winter and having decided to start grad school in the fall. We headed out in early July and hit four games at four American League parks in a week (and planning out the schedule to ensure maximum games and sufficient driving time was almost as much fun as the drive itself). We headed west through Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and into Ohio, where we stopped in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and watched the Indians beat the Royals at Jacobs Field. We enjoyed Cleveland, more than we had expected to, and would love to return for another visit, and another game.
The next time we traveled to Ohio was the in the summer of 2003, for our third baseball road trip, during which we stopped by Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati for a game. The ballpark and the town weren’t as interesting as Cleveland, but we had a good time keeping up with all of the mid-inning promotions (“If you’re sitting in section 207, row 5, seat 8, you’ll be watching the rest of the game on a luxury recliner courtesy of Bob’s Furniture!”), and headed on eastward as soon as the game ended.
While at school in Rochester, one of our class field trips took us to the Library of Congress film preservation facility in Dayton, just a few months before it moved across the country to its new home in Culpeper. Aside from the days spent touring the facility, we also hung out at Udders & Putters for mini-golf and milkshakes in nearby Yellow Springs.
And finally, on our first road trip of 2006, we made our first stop in Conneaut, Ohio, at the White Turkey Drive-In, seen above, where we enjoyed some amazing root beer floats. I’m sure we’ll cross through Ohio again on another road trip, and I look forward to seeing more of the state’s historic and ice cream-based treasures.
