Hello everyone!! We had the most fun on our little trip. It wasn’t anything big or fancy, none of our trips are, but we had a very good time. We had a bit of a crazy start though to our journey!

I planned this trip because I was looking for a train ride that wasn’t too short or too long. Wyatt loves trains and it seemed our options were the train at Greenfield Village, which is like 15 minutes of train ride, or taking a train to Chicago, which seemed much too long of a ride for Wyatt to stay seated the whole time. Like most travel and wheelchairs, once you are in your seat, that is it. No getting up! (as an aside, did you know that airplane bathrooms are not even wheelchair accessible?) So when I found the train that runs through Cuyahoga National Park, which is a two hour round trip journey, I knew it was perfect. The Akron area is about two and a half hours from our home, so not even a bad drive. I booked an Airbnb in Parma, which was a nice distance between both Akron and Cleveland, giving us plenty of options for other things to do as well.

Thursday morning we loaded up the car, and I plugged the directions into my phone – for Columbus. Not Cleveland. Our first stop was supposed to be the Cleveland Museum of Natural History – unfortunately, I set our GPS to the Columbus Museum of Natural History. We had driven about an hour and some change before we realized the mistake, and reset the directions, which put us an hour behind schedule! We weren’t in a hurry but it was still a bummer.

Then at a stop at the gas station for a fuel up and provisions, Wyatt gagged on a gummi bear and you guessed it, threw up. Yay. I happened to be in the back with him and was totally freaking out as I do, but everything was fine really. But, we had to get him cleaned up and changed, putting us more behind. Although, I was infinitely more grateful that Wyatt was ok. Obviously.

We hit the road again, this time in the right direction, with a freshly changed kiddo who was forbidden anymore gummi bears and made it to our Airbnb, about two hours behind when we had anticipated arriving. We decided it was too late to try to hit a museum so we settled into the house for about half an hour or so, and then got back in the car, although none of us wanted to, so that we could find somewhere to eat and something to do. Wyatt was all about shopping and wanted to get a book, so I googled bookstores nearby and found one about twenty minutes away.

First though, we stopped in at this little old Polish bakery and take out restaurant called Rudy’s Strudel Shop, and sort of went bonkers since we were hungry wolves, as Wyatt says.

We did try to show a little restraint. We managed to get out of there with only an apple strudel for our breakfast the next few days, a loaf of butter crust bread, a small bag of sprinkle cookies for Wyatt, and a chocolate dipped peanut butter cookie for the three of us to share. (it was huge)

We drove through steelyards and neighborhoods and found our way to the very magical bookstore called Loganberry Books, in the Larchmere neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio. From the front, it seemed like a small, quirky bookstore.

However, once you enter it is like it magically becomes much much larger. Like a Tardis. Or one of those tents from Harry Potter. It just keeps going and going, with room after room of books. They sell both new and used books, and had so many cool looking vintage books and beautiful architectural details!

Wyatt and I might have picked up a few books.

We walked up and down the streets of the little neighborhood, poking our heads into different stores and then strolling around the Fiddlehead Gallery. The two (I am assuming) owners were the nicest people! They gave us so much good information about the Cleveland area, and it was nice to chat with them. We purchased two mugs, because we might have a mug addiction, and left knowing a bit more about the area, which was nice. When we finally piled back into the car, we were all running out of steam a bit. So we nixed our plans to go out to eat and to go grocery shopping and picked up burgers on the way back to house. And that was the end of our adventure for the night! It was good we had an early night anyway, because the next day was our train ride and we had to be up early!

And I will post about that tomorrow! I just have too many photos of the next few days to put it all in one post.