No Train This Time!

Wednesday, June 26th

Today we got up quickly because we had tickets to ride the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railway, through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a United States national park that preserves and reclaims the rural landscape along the Cuyahoga River between Akron and Cleveland in Northeast Ohio. The 31.78 sq mi park, which is administered by the National Park Service, is the only national park in Ohio.

Cuyahoga means "crooked river" in Mohawk, which is part of the Iroquoian language family.

We made good time and got to the Akron Northside Station early, so we wandered around and waited. More and more people showed up, and soon there was quite a croud, including a large group of teenagers on a field-trip of some kind.

The train was supposed to arrive at 10:25, so Tony positioned himself for a good photo-op, while I waited at the platform. Time came and went, and still no train. I then overheard them say due to storms in the area, some trees had fallen over the tracks and they were delayed as they had to clear them.

Waiting for the train

We waited and waited, now it was 11:05, well past the departure time, and still no train. We then heard there was another tree down on the tracks, and the removal could take hours!!

They finally offered to bus the folks over to another station to board the train, or you could reschedule for another day... but we gave up on the trip. We decided a bus ride to wait on a train to move was not the best plan for our day, and we opted to just drive into the park and explore, instead. The tickets were not expensive, so we chalked it up as a donation to the cause. After all, it's run by volunteers!

We instead headed the direction we thought we'd see the most of the park, through Akron, then opted to stop for lunch, first. We happened upon a Red Lobster, and since it was lunchtime, we knew we'd get a nice lunch menu and pricing. We had a great meal of popcorn shrimp, our favorite!

After lunch, we drove into the park and started looking for a visitor center. We passed one area where our map said there was one, but could not locate it. This park was unlike any we'd been to, there were homes and small rural towns, stores and farms, crops and animals all throughout everywhere we drove. The train tracks ran along-side the river through the valley, and we could tell it was a unique area... You'd never guess you were surrounded by the cities of Akron and Cleveland!

Sign indicates a National Park!

We cris-crossed the river many times. Since they had heavy rain the night before, it was high, and muddy.

Driving along in the park, under I-80 and I-270 bridges.

However, due to the fact that this wasn't your usual "controlled" park, we were not overwhelmed by what we saw, and after getting somewhat lost and confused by the lack of park structure, we decided to head back home.

We ended up enjoying a nap and then prepped for departure tomorrow.


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