Motor City Madwoman

20 March, 2001
(Driving from Cochranton, PA, through Cleveland, to Detroit, MI)

Thanks to the several horns full of water we'd had before bed, neither Groa nor I woke up with hangovers the next morning. After a bit of breakfast, we took the pictures you saw last night, and climbed around her grounds to see some other shrines she'd placed: an Odhinns-ve, and one to the Vanir at a bottom of the hill by a freshening creek. It was inappropriate to take pictures of these places, although I did take a fist-size stone to seed my own collection back home.

Oh, and here's a picture of Groa, because I forgot to post it yesterday:

Unfortunately, I sort of had to be in Detroit at the same time, so after that I had to run. I decided to go home a different way than the one I'd come: over a state route that became a causeway over Lake Pymatuning, a body of water straddling the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. It ran into Andover, the town just on the Ohio side of the lake, and at a stop sign, I was faced with another reminder that northeast Ohio used to be part of Connecticut.

See, when the English kings were handing out land charters, the north and south borders would be clearly marked, the eastern one is pretty obvious (the Atlantic), but the western one would be something like, "And unto the Western Sea" in more than one case. Now, Pennsylvania and New York claimed a bit, but after they were done, you could still grab a little chunk west of the Appalachians and south of Lake Erie, and that's what they did: sent New Englanders out into the untamed frontier to carve out homesteads and found towns.

This doesn't really mean anything anymore, except that towns all over Northeast Ohio have village greens, town squares, or the like. Even big routes have to jog around it like a huge traffic circle. I had to do that a couple times on the trip west on US 6, which I actually did take most of the way back to Cleveland, but eventually I got bored and hopped back on I-90 for the rest of the trip.

The next couple hours I pretty adequately covered in the Cleveland; let's not again. I eventuallyl got back on the road and drove across almost two hundred miles of flat Ohio farmland, take that right turn at Toledo, and into Detroit to return the rental.

I passed into Detroit, returned the rental car, and got a ride to Lissa's. Unfortuantely, she had a commitment she couldn't break, and so it was her partner, Judith, and I, who went to dinner at an Iraqi kabob restaurant, where I had heart, liver, and kidney on sticks -- I found them all quite tasty. Then we went back to Judith's house, where I gave what information I could on people we both knew on the Old Garndnerians' Network, and I loafed online until Lissa came home, some hours later. We chatted companionably for a couple hours... which left four hours for sleep, as Judith would have to drop me off for the train on her way to work in the morning, leaving me two hours until the train came to take me to Chicago. I fell into bed to catch what sleep I could.