Laying over a few days in the Cleveland area on our final RV tour across the continent, we continued to discover some of the surprisingly idyllic and expansive parks to be found in the Cleveland metro area.

This included Cuyahoga Valley National Park, named after the Cuyahoga River, which has come a long way in the past few decades. It was once so polluted from industrial waste that it caught fire. And not just once, either.

There are about 100 waterfalls to be found in these parks, most notably Brqndywine Falls. Other points of interest include the Canal Exploration Center (housed in an old tavern building) the Peninsula Train Depot, and the Frazee House, a brick dwelling dating back to 1825. Its construction was interrupted by a bunch of guys digging the Ohio and Erie Canal through its front yard.

And speaking of the canal, there are remnants of it still in place, such as canal locks and the former towpath, which is now used as a hiking and biking trail.

Seeing this towpath again brought back fond memories of the summer of 2007, when we biked from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC (a distance of some 350 miles) in 7 days, partly on this towpath bike trail.

Biking on alternate days (one of us had to drive the RV to a rendezvous point), we passed some pleasant scenery and some cool points of interest, such as Harper’s Ferry. (The path terminates in D.C. where the canal ends with a dam. Nearby, a complex of apartments and office buildings was constructed and named The Watergate, and chances are you’ve heard of it a time or two.)

This time, we had no bicycles. So we just contented ourselves with hiking along the trail and snapping photos of wildlife and points of interest, while our RV sat and basked in nature and nostalgia.

6/12-13/2023