In the morning, we got up from the hotel and found that there were no bath towels. We had to dry off with only hand towels, of which there were two. We managed to dry off and get out in the morning and decided to head to breakfast.

There was a location called Juneberry that was touted as the best breakfast place in Cleveland by some places anyway, so we headed in that direction. When we got there, the wait for Juneberry was an hour, which was a lot more time than we wanted to spend waiting for food before we got on with our day. Since we had passed a donut shop called Goldie’s on the way there, on the same block, we went to Goldie’s, and both got long johns, chocolate covered top with vanilla cream filling, and I got a coffee. It was totally fulfilling, and as we walked past the Juneberry on the way to the car, we laughed at the people standing around waiting for their truly frou-frou and bougie experience in their fancy breakfast place.

Before we got in the car, we used an online spinner wheel to determine what we would do for the morning. There was an attraction called Jackknife Bridge on Atlas Obscura that seemed unique. We added that to the wheel, and the wheel told us that that was where we needed to go, so we went to see it. We parked the car in the parking lot of some random strip club. It had a completely empty parking lot during the day, obviously, and walked over and checked out the Jackknife Bridge. It’s like a bridge; it sticks up in the air and doesn’t cross water. I’m not exactly sure what it’s all about. Plants are growing all over it, and it’s rusty, but it looks pretty neat. We took a whole bunch of pictures before some other couple showed up and were taking pictures for themselves.

We loaded back in the car and decided it wouldn’t be terrible to drive by at least some of the other attractions in Cleveland before moving on to our next predetermined destination, so we drove by the Giant Free Stamp. It’s simply a giant rubber stamp that says “FREE”. Riley took a picture of that and got a quick peek at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame pyramids. Still, it was a poor glimpse because we caught them out of the corner of our eye as we drove by quickly.

We got on the highway and headed out to Cedar Point. It was about an hour’s drive or so. Cedar Point is like a peninsula on which they built a bazillion roller coasters. I would guess it is possibly the densest roller coaster-to-land ratio on the planet. The weather was not entirely cooperating. When we left the hotel in the morning, the weather report said it was likely to thunderstorm at random spots during the day, so we were betting on the fact that the rain would scare people away. Really, it seemed like there was about the same attitude from everyone at the park as we had.
There were a lot of people at the park, but we walked in and got on the first ride we saw when we entered the park. It’s called the Gatekeeper, and it’s the roller coaster you can see right at the entrance of the park. It goes directly over the sign welcoming you to Cedar Point. That one was my favorite of the coasters we rode. It was remarkably smooth, had lots of inversions, and the first dip at the drop was pretty good. Overall, the wait was short for such a good roller coaster, which was neat.

We walked around, got some food at a random 50s diner type of place, and found out that the food passes I bought didn’t cover drinks. It would have been better to have drink passes instead of food passes because we could have used more liquid all day out in the sun after the weather cleared up.

We got on another roller coaster called the Rougarou, which was the roughest roller coaster we rode. It had many inversions in a small area but had pads on either side of your head to keep your head from moving around too much. My head bounced off those pads way too much, making it a bit of a painful experience, but overall, it was a fun coaster.

After that, we decided we only had time for one more coaster because we were only stopping at Cedar Point for a few hours. There were many more coasters we might have liked to ride, but there just wasn’t time. The last coaster we got on was called Valravn. The wait time on the app said it was a 45-minute wait, which was doable for our timing. However, when we got to the ride entrance, the sign said the wait was an hour and 15 minutes, which was longer than we wanted to stay, but still probably good.

We got in line and waited, and we were about to go up the stairs to board the train when they stopped the ride due to maintenance issues. We had to wait for another half hour for maintenance to come and get the trains moving again. Those poor people were stuck on the roller coaster for quite some time. But eventually, they got it working, and we got on the ride, which was a smooth and exciting coaster ride.

It’s a different kind of coaster, called a dive coaster, where it takes you up and then goes around a corner. Instead of the gradual over-the-hill drop you get with most coasters, this one dangles you over the edge of a 90-degree drop, holding the brake on the coaster, and then suddenly lets you go. You go through some loops and inversions, then you get to another drop where you slow down and drop at 90 degrees again, going through more coaster track. It was a pretty intense ride. This particular roller coaster, the Valravn, was an award-winning coaster when it was built in 2016, and it was pretty neat to get on.

Ultimately, we decided to get that ride even though there were coasters nearby that we could have ridden about six times based on the difference in wait time. I think it was still worth it. We got off that ride and went and did a little shopping since I needed a sweatshirt. I hadn’t packed anything warm, and some of the hotel rooms seemed like they could be pretty cold. But I got a couple of Valravn hoodies, and we headed back out to the parking lot to get in the car and go to our next destination.

This was probably the longest stretch of the ride to the next destination that we had plotted. It was four hours straight, with a break in the middle for a potential stop at a driving range. The interesting thing to us about this driving range was that it was across the border from Indiana into Michigan. The hope was that we’d be able to drive some balls from Michigan down into Indiana. There was supposed to be some mini golf and stuff there, too. But when we got to the golf driving range, it looked like it had been closed for a while. There was just a boarded-up house. There was a car in the lot and some random dude sitting on the pavement. There was no sign of business or life of other kinds. So we decided to hightail it out of there.

Instead, we went up the street to Walmart and refilled on supplies. We got a whole bunch more applesauce, which we’ve been enjoying on the trip, some chips, and Frisbees for a future stop. Rather than trying any local food places, which I know we’ll catch grief about later when we tell people about it, we instead decided to eat at Wendy’s. But the fact of the matter is, we just wanted to get on the road with food that wasn’t going to kill us. So we stopped real quick.

After Wendy’s, we left, kept driving, and got to Chesterton, which is where our stop was. Found the hotel and pulled into our room around 10 o’clock. That drive was kind of intriguing, too, in its own way, even though it was just a drive. Because we crossed a time zone and the ETA on the car had us arriving earlier than the current time for a good bit of the drive, which is an unusual thing that you don’t see all the time unless you live in this area and are crossing that time zone line frequently. But we ultimately got to the hotel at around 10 o’clock local time, which is 11 Eastern. We crashed in the hotel room and got ready for our next day of adventure, heading out to Chicago and Wisconsin Dells to see what’s there.