urban bicycle journeys

I have always had a soft spot for Cleveland OH, maybe because I was a huge fan of Cleveland’s killer but misunderstood 1970’s rock band, The Raspberries. Going up there to bicycle would bring the promise of cooler weather. Why not attempt to bicycle from Cleveland to Buffalo along the south shore of Lake Erie?

I could have taken the airplane but It is easy to drive up there. I doubt most North Carolinians realize I-77 goes straight north from downtown Charlotte to the exotic (to me) Midwest. The relatively new I-74 above Winston-Salem allows a stress free drive from the Raleigh/Durham area connecting to I-77 to all the way across West Virginia to Ohio and Cleveland. There are usually few traffic hiccups because the highway does not go through any major cities.

On a Friday morning in August I played a vigorous pickle ball session with Tootie and friends. I then went back to my Chapel Hill NC home and made a delicious sandwich in our kitchen; fresh summer tomato and organic ham. About eleven in the morning I starting driving our Ford Escape Hybrid west and north with my Bike Friday model New World Tourer in the back. I took the sandwich as road food. If I drove the car nonstop I might get to Cleveland by dinnertime.

Eight hours later on the tail end of a ferocious thunderstorm I drove into inner-city Cleveland OH, into a neighborhood called Ohio City which looked like the kind of neighborhood might like to live in. My Airbnb was in the house on the right.

The hotels in downtown Cleveland this particular night were really expensive so I looked at alternatives. Airbnb is just a computer program so all the stays are quite different from each another. One has to read the descriptions and reviews carefully. This house in Ohio City Cleveland had its downsides but the price was right. It promoted its common TV room and kitchen downstairs (who wants to watch TV with someone you don’t know?) and the clean rooms upstairs that line a hallway had a shared bath at one end. It was quiet and clean but mildly creepy. I saw no other guests during my stay and felt totally safe.

I had made a deal with the Airbnb operator to let me park there for five days. Arriving about 8:00 PM I parked and walked to the nearby commercial strip, looking for somewhere to eat. The Old Angle Tavern had an appropriately urban atmosphere with TVs blasting the Cleveland professional sporting events. I sat at the bar and ordered an IPA along with cheeseburger and fries. It was good to relax. I had been stressed by the intense rain at the end of the long drive. The bartenders were colorful.

Early the next morning I pulled the Bike Friday from the back of my car and headed east by bicycle. Buffalo NY was just over two hundred miles to the northeast and I budgeted four or five days to cycle there. This was the route I eventually took.

From my Ohio City neighborhood, downtown Cleveland was only a mile or two away by bike path across the Cuyahoga River.

I cycled the Detroit Avenue Bridge across the Cuyahoga River near where the river empties into Lake Erie. In fifty years Cleveland has gone from being a national joke of a city to being seen as an OK place, maybe even a pretty nice place. In the process thousands of high paying industrial jobs were lost. The population of Cleveland plummeted from 910,000 in 1950 to 750,000 in 1970 to 368,000 today. In the late 1960’s the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it occasionally caught fire, Randy Newman’s 1972 song about Cleveland; “Burn On” was on his album Sail Away. His songwriting style makes it difficult to know whether he is kidding or not. “Cleveland; city of lights; you’re calling me; while the Cuyahoga River goes smoking through my dreams.” Maybe his song contributed to the political will to pass the apparently successful national Clean Water Act of 1972.

For true fans only here is a wonderful clip I found from 1972.

On the ground at 7:30 AM on this Saturday morning in 2023 Cleveland seems a transformed place. Lake Erie is now so clean that I discovered it was being used for the swim portion of a triathlon, starting in front of the I.M. Pei designed Rock & Roll Hall of Fame museum.

What route to choose to bicycle towards the east? I chose to cycle along Lake Erie, skipping most other Cleveland neighborhoods. Cleveland Lakefront Airport, used only for general aviation, had a pleasant mid-century modernist terminal building.

There was a lakefront bicycle path, at least for a few miles. The weather was glorious and crisp, about ten degrees cooler than back in that North Carolina summer.

After the bike path ended it segued onto a residential street through the affluent waterfront neighborhood of Bratenahl, with estate-like homes lining the lake.

I had not eaten breakfast yet. I do not usually do a lot of planning but this morning before leaving I had picked out a coffee house about ten miles into the bike ride. As most of my readers know, I am a big fan of independent coffee houses in America. Just a couple of blocks east of prosperous Bratenahl the neighborhood transitioned quickly to older early 1900’s houses close together, some houses abandoned or with boarded up windows. On the edge of the other side of that neighborhood, in a block of mostly empty storefronts was Six Shooter Coffee manned by one young woman. In addition to coffee their menu including something called a vegetarian burrito, which turned out to be delicious. I relaxed sitting on the sidewalk with the burrito and an oat milk latte, two packs sugar, reading The New Yorker on my Kindle. I watched customers from a cross section of society walk through the door, mostly getting coffees To Go. Note that both the burrito and the coffee were served on actual china plates, not paper or plastic.

I eventually got back on the bicycle and continued cycling east, mostly on a conventional arterial street with varying amounts of traffic.

There are continuous towns and neighborhoods along the lake the entire seventy miles that I bicycled this day. The town of Eastlake OH (population 18,000) is creatively named for being on the lake and east of Cleveland. I bicycled by its suburban town hall which is surrounded by what it calls The Boulevard of 500 Flags. They looked all to be American flags. It all seems a bit much.

In Painesville the Lake County Courthouse, from 1909, was impressive.

In some areas I was able to cycle along the lakefront on a residential-like street lined with waterfront houses.

Madison Township Park had lakefront picnic tables covered from the sun. It seemed a good place to stop for lunch.

It’s not that I like peanut butter sandwiches all that much, it’s just that they are healthy, non-perishable, and easy to carry. On this trip I made my sandwich with Trader Joe’s dried cherries which I had gotten from a colleague. I now advocate for dried cherries mixed with honey, plus, of course, non-homogenized peanut butter.

I watched kids playing on the beach. Lake Erie seemed like the ocean.

I continued cycling. I confess I had never heard of Geneva On The Lake OH (population 916), a town fifty something miles east of Cleveland. Its main street looks like the midway of a 1950’s amusement park. A sunny Saturday afternoon in August was certainly their high season. Those of us from The South can get a little worn down in August but up here on the Great Lakes they CELEBRATE summer.

On the way out of town at a public lakefront park I saw something I never would have imagined existing in 2023; a gathering of Ford Pinto owners.

It was still eighteen miles to my intended destination of Ashtabula OH, where I had booked an Airbnb. Ashtabula had a totally different vibe from Geneva On The Lake. Ashtabula is a Lake Erie port where commodities like coal can be transloaded to and from ship to rail. The population of Ashtabula is now about 18,000, about the same as it was back in 1910, when there were a plethora of immigrants from Italy, Sweden and Finland, who, according to Wikipedia, liked it that coal loading jobs did not require you to speak English.

It was about to thunderstorm but I stopped downtown at Harbor Perk Coffeehouse for an iced oat milk latte with two sugars, to go.

With my latte in hand I cycled about a mile across a small bridge to where the Airbnb was supposed to be, getting inside before the rain with only second to spare.

My Airbnb was an entire small house in an older neighborhood. There was an air conditioner but it was cool enough that I could open the windows, listening to the downpour outside. Coming from The South, having summer temperatures low enough to pleasantly open your windows in the summer is a treat. Later on, after the rain had stopped I bicycled over to a restaurant about a mile away. It was not downtown but instead on the highway leading out of town. The parking lot was full; this photo comes from the next morning.

The Crow’s Nest did not advertise itself as such but its Italian-American nature was self evident. I sat at a rectangular bar among a group of colorful locals. The middle aged woman next to me sat drinking a cocktail while holding a pizza in its box. Eventually she went out and put the to-go pizza in her car, then came back for another drink.

I could think of ordering nothing else, eggplant parmesan, cooked like most Italian-American restaurants do, where they deep fat fry the breaded eggplant slices, then cover those with cheese slices and house red sauce. It sits aside pasta with more of the same sauce. Delicious.

An older guy sitting to my left was impressed that I ate the whole plateful. He is the owner of a regional chain of supermarkets. He was conversing with a man sitting on HIS left, who turned out to be the owner of this restaurant. The supermarket guy did all the talking, going on about the difficulty of getting good employees.

As I was leaving the owner shook my hand, thanked me for coming to his restaurant. He asked where I was from and when I told him and the supermarket guy I was from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, they seemed mildly shocked, acting like no one ever comes in here from places like that. Restaurant prices in most of America have gone through the roof but the Crow’s Nest was quite reasonable. The eggplant dish was $13.99 including a salad. The bar had compted me at least one glass of wine.

The next morning in the Airbnb house I was able to prepare coffee that they provided. There in the house I had a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, including dried cherries and honey.

On my street here in Ashtabula, within a few blocks of each other, were two pretty substantial early twentieth century buildings, each for an Italian-American social group.

The morning cycling was delightful. It now felt like I was out in the country, away from urbanism at least for a while. My day’s destination would be Erie PA, about fifty miles further along the lake.

I passed this sketchy looking establishment sitting by itself on the lakefront highway outside of Ashtabula OH.

An about five mile section of my highway was closed for construction. I bicycled around all the barriers and was able to continue with no problem. I had no idea what I would run into or why the road was closed.

Cycling on a closed highway is a dream. In some places the highway ran right alongside the lake.

I never found out why this highway was barricaded. Further on the highway department had blockaded the road with heavy equipment. I just walked the bicycle around that stuff.

Route 531 soon transitioned back to a normal open highway but there was still very little car traffic on this Sunday morning.

I passed through the town of Conneaut OH, including an impressive pre-WWII gas station. I then crossed the line into Pennsylvania.

The Erie Triangle area of Pennsylvania, which includes the city of Erie PA, is not near any of the major cities of Pennsylvania. While it is “only” 130 miles to Pittsburgh, it is more than 400 miles and more than a six hour car drive to Philadelphia. I cycled through rural countryside. Cyclists take note: Pennsylvania highways have more and wider shoulders than Ohio, and certainly more than North Carolina.

I had left Ashtabula OH quite early on this Sunday morning and by 11:30 AM I had already gone the major portion of the distance scheduled for that day. I had planned to buy lunch somewhere but not just yet. It was only about sixteen miles to downtown Erie PA. In what looked like the middle of nowhere, not really in a town, I came upon Twisted Elk Brewery.

There seemed to be no one around. I couldn’t believe the door was open. I eventually found a few employees inside but saw no customers. I walked up to their otherwise vacant bar.

They confirmed they were open and yes, they served brunch. What’s not to like? I ordered what the menu described as “Chorizo, Egg, Potatoes, Cheese Breakfast Flat.” It was absolutely fresh and delicious. With a beer I ate it outside on their patio devoid of customers other than me.

I relaxed and read The New Yorker on my Kindle, and gradually other customers started arriving. In the cooler summer air it was a very relaxing scene. I sat for as long as possible before finally getting back on the bicycle and heading to what now seemed to be the big city of Erie PA. While cycling I passed miles of grapevines.

I love looking at train stations and airports and I bicycled right by the Erie PA airport. It seemed small enough to be quite handy. I have now looked online, the airport has three American Airlines flights a day to Charlotte NC, nothing else!

As one bicycles into a small city like Erie PA (population 94,000), one transitions from 1950’s suburbia to 1920’s and earlier neighborhoods, then on to the actual downtown.

Erie PA, as an urban space, is only doing just barely OK. Erie joins my long list of cities I have visited where the tallest building even now was built in the frenzy of 1925-29.

I had forgotten to bring extra underwear on this trip and I had time to go shopping. I am not particularly picky about brands. Checking on Google the only store I could find in downtown Erie that sold any kind of merchandise at all was one Dollar General. I asked the guy at the front where their underwear was and he said their stocks were running a little low. The shelves were about empty in that section but I did find something. On checking out I asked him about it; he said the shelves might be so empty because of so much shoplifting. This situation may be because downtown shopping is just no longer done in most of America. There is a Walmart two and a half miles away.

There was indeed action a few blocks downhill at the lakefront. I had investigated spending the night and having dinner in the older downtown of Erie but saw that it would be much more pleasant just a few blocks away on redeveloped former industrial waterfront property. Certainly in the summer this was the better choice. As in most cities like this, the hospital is a huge driver of the economy, and that was down on the lakefront as well. The Hampton Inn I stayed at is on the left on the photo below, the UPMC hospital is in the center.

All along this Lake Erie coast I saw situations where the locals wanted to celebrate summer and a beach culture, with open air bars on the lakefront. Here in downtown Erie PA I had a drink at Woody’s Backwater which was on a pier. The atmosphere was festive, with live music, an acoustic guitar duo. Cocktail prices in America have gone crazy but here in a lovely waterfront location in Erie PA a “call” drink, a Tanqueray gin and tonic was only five dollars.

Woody’s food did not look too appetizing and a lot of restaurants were closed on Sunday. Lots of online reviews recommended the restaurant in the nearby Sheraton Hotel. I do not normally think of a hotel restaurant but this was Erie PA on a Sunday. Salmon with curry spices cooked rare with polenta and vegetables was really good. I could sit at the bar and stare out the window at Lake Erie.

The next morning I cycled through the depressed northeast neighborhoods of Erie PA.

I am a fan of planes, trains, and automobiles. I already knew that the biggest producer of diesel-electric locomotives in America and a world leader in this technology had been GE Transportation of General Electric, and that these locomotives have been built in Erie PA for close to one hundred years. In 2019 General Electric sold its operation to Westinghouse Brake, also called WABTEC. I even knew that in 2011 General Electric announced a new production facility for locomotives in Fort Worth TX, likely because Wall Street was brutally insisting they put a lid on the Erie PA union situation. I bicycled by the Erie WABTEC facility on my way out of town. Behind these trees is a huge and ancient complex, like something from a movie about 1920’s industrialization.

It was like a military base, with several gates of a fenced area with woods on most sides. From the main highway I could see come gatherings of people so I bicycled over there to look around. It was a strike! The strikers were gathered around each of several side entrances. There were at least a hundred people there. The big facility is in the background.

Since I was cycling by these crowds obliviously taking pictures, I raised by fist in solidarity, if for no other reason than self-protection. Later on I researched this strike. It has been going for a month or two, since June. The union signs a contract every four years and this year is the fourth.

I was soon back on the road.

Like the day before I passed miles of grapevines along Lake Erie while crossing into New York State.

Later in the day I talked to some guy who confirmed my thoughts; that while there were indeed grapes being grown here to make wine and there were wineries right along the road, most of these grapes are Concord grapes, raised for Welch’s type grape juice and grape jelly.

There was roadside art.

I stopped for lunch in Westfield NY, a Lake Erie fishing outpost now also tourist spot. There was one place open for lunch, somewhere you could sit outside for sandwiches.

The menu offered a Lake Erie perch sandwich but they bemoaned that they were out of perch this day. Fascinating for me was an item innocuously on the menu, “goulash” for eight dollars.

I had just been to Eastern Europe but here in Westfield NY goulash was pasta with ground beef and tomatoes. Satisfying.

It was seventeen miles further to my day’s destination Fredonia NY (population 10,000), a pleasant and seemingly remote town just a couple of miles from Lake Erie. I wanted a coffee place where I could sit, decompress and confirm my plans. Right on my way was a Starbucks on the campus of State University of New York (SUNY) at Fredonia, which has about four thousand students.

There were a few chain motels here but all were out on the highway. I chose instead the Edwards Waterhouse Inn, a maybe five room bed and breakfast I found on Google and booked by telephone.

The older couple running this place try very hard to do a good job. There was a small air conditioner but once again I reveled in opening the windows.

Campano’s Cucina in downtown Fredonia NY is a really nice Italian-American restaurant, a few steps up in both price and social status from Crow’s Nest two days earlier in Ashtabula OH. Some of the old guys here at the bar were offering to buy me drinks. One is the former mayor of the town, which Wikipedia says is majority Italian-American.

Up here close to Canada they are drinking Labatt Blue Light.

Once again I got eggplant parmesan. That included a salad. The old guys at the bar recommended blue cheese dressing, My puritanical nature said “no” but I am so glad that I relented.

The main eggplant course was of course was delicious. I had chosen penne pasta. The sauce had an almost Mexicanny intensity.

I had been compted at least one glass of wine. I skipped dessert but bought a pack of Peanut M&Ms at a convenience store while walking “home.”

I assume the American style of “Bed & Breakfast” is only an American thing, and observationally the Airbnb app might be putting on damper on that business. The traditional American style of B&B is a Victorian era house with fru-fru Victorian style furniture and one’s stay includes a fancy breakfast cooked by the owner. The older couple running the Edwards Waterhouse Inn in Fredonia NY successfully checked all these boxes. The husband served as waiter and his wife was cooking. The breakfast began with fresh fruit served on real silver and fancy china on a pressed white tablecloth. He did not mind that I took his picture. There was one other party staying in the Inn.

I didn’t get a photo of the main course but we had been given a choice of three. I had scrambled eggs and sausage, whole wheat toast.

It was fifty something miles to Buffalo NY. I wanted to go all the way but because of predicted heavy afternoon rain and anticipated difficult urban cycling on the south side of Buffalo I decided to first regroup in a town fifteen miles south of Buffalo; Hamburg NY, where I found online an interesting sounding Airbnb.

Fredonia NY is immediately adjacent to another town of similar size, Dunkirk NY.

While Fredonia NY traditionally is Italian, Dunkirk NY is Polish.

I cycled along next to Lake Erie, passing more grapevines and scattered houses. In a five mile stretch I passed through the Seneca Indian reservation. After that some towns seem to be working and middle class second home communities that cherished their lakefront location.

I have cycled in Quebec and Ontario and Tim Hortons is by far the largest Canadian fast food chain. Doughnuts. I have read that they lost a lot of money trying to expand to the USA. We just don’t get it. Now they limit their USA presence to places relatively near the border, like here thirty miles south of Buffalo.

Closer to Buffalo there is a line of estate like houses along the lake. I have read that many of these are late nineteenth/early twentieth century summer homes of the Buffalo elite.

The clouds were darkening as I made a right turn for the five additional miles to Hamburg NY. I could see the skyline of downtown Buffalo off in the distance.

Hamburg NY is a pleasant place with a small town vibe. Someone has recently taken an ungainly older building and made it into a bar/restaurant with about ten Airbnb rooms upstairs. Here on a Monday the restaurant was closed but I had been given a code to get into a nicely renovated room upstairs. I could open the windows. I saw no other guests and never physically met the owners. I rushed in before the rain started. On these bike trips I am prepared to be rained on but avoiding it is much more pleasant.

Much later the rain had stopped and I walked around looking for a drink and a meal. Hamburg has a well thought out central square. I come from The South and we have spent a lot of energy trying to take down Civil War monuments. Up here I doubt it is much of an issue.

I had an IPA at the crowded bar of a pizza place. Others had Bud Light.

A young woman was performing countryish songs outside with only her guitar accompaniment. She was very good.

I chose not to eat dinner there and walked a few blocks over to a Thai place that had good online reviews. I let the waitress choose my noodle dish after I asked for “something other than pad thai.” Others were standing inline for to-go orders.

That evening I sat in bed and booked an online Greyhound bus ticket for thirty-four dollars, departing downtown Buffalo the next morning at 11:00 AM and arriving nonstop to Cleveland in three and a half hours.

In the morning I made coffee in my room and ate a peanut butter and dried cherry and honey sandwich, then hit the road by 7:30 AM. If there were no hurdles the bike ride should not take more than two hours. It had rained the night before.

American cities grow in unusual patterns. On a previous trip I cycled through miles of abandoned housing in Buffalo. Buffalo has lost over half its population since 1950. Meanwhile just twelve miles from downtown, in suburban Hamburg NY, new housing is going up.

Eventually I was back cycling along the lakefront. Windmills were off in the distance.

The lakefront highway became wider as we got closer to the city. There was a wide shoulder to cycle on but it was loud and unpleasant. I cycled through miles of live and dead industry. It was a weekday rush hour and traffic was heavy. I passed the Ford Buffalo Stamping Plant, which seemed very much in operation.

Through the Lackawanna area I saw abandoned or semi-abandoned steel mills.

I did see the reason that Adventure Cycling maps routed a bicyclist around Buffalo much farther inland, to avoid this choke point where waterfront factories collide with only one highway. At one point I rode on a sidewalk alongside heavy industry.

I had to push the bicycle across the highway but near the Buffalo city limits a waterfront bike path began, guiding me alongside old factories.

I could see the high rise buildings of downtown Buffalo not that off. Cycling further led me to the Empire State Trail. As I got closer to downtown industrialization gave way to stuff like a marina.

Nearing downtown someone has put up fancy looking apartments with a waterfront view, built amidst industry still cranking or abandoned.

While I thought I was still among industrial decay, electric bike share!

I had to cross some small bridges but soon I was in downtown Buffalo.

I had a little over an hour before my bus left. I had been in central Buffalo on earlier bike rides. A nice shorter bike trip is to ride from Buffalo to Toronto via Niagara Falls in three days; I did this twice with my late son Henry in about 2007 and 2009. There is also the 350 mile Erie Canal bicycle trail to Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. I have done that in pieces.

I have am a big fan of Buffalo as an urban space despite its obvious problems. On this trip for reasons of time I chose to forego seeming much of the city. Greyhound buses leave from the Metropolitan Transportation Center, a 1977 brutalist structure that evokes a bomb shelter.

The bus station was full of poor people but it seemed well maintained with reasonably clean floors and restrooms, While I have taken buses in other countries I cannot remember taking a Greyhound bus for more than forty years. While an undergrad in the 1970’s I took Greyhound many times four hours each way from Norfolk VA to Washington College in Maryland. Taking the Greyhound bus in 2023 was going to be an educational experience.

To carry my bicycle on the bus I had schlepped all the way from Cleveland a soft Samsonite bag that I use to package my folding Bike Friday bicycle. I unscrewed various items including the pedals, back rack and the front wheel so the bicycle would fit in the black case with red trim.

Here in Buffalo and also in Cleveland, I learned Greyhound requires the passenger to load and unload their own luggage under the bus. As advice to Bike Friday riders taking Greyhound, while Greyhound’s online regulations seem to require folding bicycles to be packaged, I now realize I could have encased a partially folded bicycle in a plastic trash bag and could have foregone having to bring the Samsonite case and unscrewing all that stuff. The bus was nonstop so no one would have touched the bicycle en route.

The bus was half an hour late but otherwise fine. It was only half full and was nonstop. What could go wrong? Actually, nothing went wrong. Three and a half hours after leaving we pulled into the Cleveland bus station at about three in the afternoon. The Cleveland bus station, from 1948, is architecturally listed an example of streamline moderne.

The interior of the Cleveland bus station is architecturally well preserved but filthy. I sat among the squalor and put my bicycle back together, unable to avoid listening to a young woman next to me talk about her serious problems over the phone to her mother.

I cycled through central Cleveland.

I bicycled across the Cuyahoga River on that same Detroit Avenue Bridge, looking down at the river that caught fire back in 1969. It is now lined with parks.

I looked back at downtown.

I stayed that night in an Airbnb in the same general area as I had stayed four days earlier, this time in a sub-neighborhood of Ohio City called Duck Island. I am not a fan of basement apartments but this basement room of a modern house was delightful and affordable and not damp feeling at all. The owners had gone to a lot of trouble getting everything right. One of them must OCD, which in a rental is a very good thing. On their street you could see downtown in the distance.

I was able to walk to any of several attractive restaurants. I chose TownHall. Billed as a health food restaurant, it evokes the late great Pywacket Restaurant at home in Chapel Hill NC, somewhere many of us still miss even though it has been closed for about twenty years. I used to describe Pywacket as “gourmet health food.” TownHall was not inexpensive but otherwise near perfect, including its physical setting. Here up in the Midwest the summer is celebrated. Indoors and outdoors were mixed together.

Poke is Hawaiian but in most of America it is deconstructed sushi, which is a good thing. My dinner of that here was delicious and fresh.

After finishing the poke I was still hungry so I ordered a bowl of vegetarian chili, something I previously had not been a fan of. The creamlike sauce made the difference.

The next morning I got up and prepared to leave by car to drive home. I needed breakfast to eat on the road.

There is a new, very popular bagel bakery next to my condo building in back home Chapel Hill NC. Even though it has lines out the door every morning I have never even tried it. Because I am out of town I have become more adventuresome. In Cleveland things seemed different. I was on vacation! On the way out of town I drove over the short distance to Cleveland Bagel. I had learned about it from a list provided by my Airbnb host.

I ordered an “everything” bagel with their $11.00 breakfast supreme; bagel with smear of cream cheese with smoked salmon (lox) and capers, with a little sliced onion. This and a hot oat milk latte, one pack sugar. I took all this and started driving and eating the five hundred miles and eight hours all the way to Chapel Hill NC. I needed to get back to Weaver Street Market for my weekly men’s club meeting at 5:15 on Thursdays. The bagel sandwich was fabulous, really. It was huge so I am glad they cut it in half. I could eat the other half for lunch, also while driving.

My car ride helped me understand how remote much of West Virginia really is. The Cleveland metro area extends about as far south as Canton OH. From Canton OH it is a four hundred mile drive through southern Ohio but mostly West Virginia to Winston-Salem NC, the next real city of consequence, unless you consider Charleston WV as an important city. On those four hundred miles on an Interstate highway one passes hardly anywhere most people have heard of. Most of the license plates on the West Virginia highway are from out of state.

Two thirds of the way into my drive, sixty miles south of Charleston WV the highway passed by Beckley WV (population 18,000). I had a chance to pull off the highway and look up coffee shops on my phone. HeBrews Coffee in Beckley WV about four miles off the interstate.

I ordered a large oat milk latte, two packs sugar. They only had almond milk, but fine. Their food menu was unusual for a coffee shop. Its most popular item appeared to be a chili dog with mustard and onions. When in Rome…

I had asked the young woman the origin of their name. She said it definitely was not Jewish. She said it was just “he” (God) “brews” (makes coffee.) She indicated all of the employees were of the same Christian sect. She said she was aware of the coffee shop I had been to in Pennsylvania with the same name but said they were not connected, I ordered a chili dog. I ate it and drank the coffee while continuing to drive down I-77 towards the Virginia border.

Only later when I was finished the coffee in the car did I realize the name of a bible verse was hand-written on my coffee cup. Was this intended for me specifically or was this just something they always did? I guess I will never know. I am not a particularly religious person but when I got home I looked up the verse.

“The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

I did indeed arrive back in Chapel Hill NC in time for my men’s group meeting at 5:15 PM. It had been a long drive.