Before leaving, I made a list of several things I wanted to do in Cleveland, with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum at the top, followed by the rest in descending order of priority. I left my apartment at 5 am Central and arrived in Cleveland’s Natural History Museum at 11 am Eastern (losing an hour). The Hybrid’s mileage lived up to its reputation, and the full tank I had in Chicago was enough to make the full journey (unfortunately, the same could not be said for my bladder). I’d prepaid for my museum tickets ($25) and paid for parking ($12) when I arrived. In hindsight, I think $10 admission and $5 parking would have been more like it. This Museum was much smaller than Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, though it did have some notable specimens

For starters, they had the famed dog, Balto, stuffed and on display. This was a real surprise to me because I never knew that the animated ‘90s movie Balto was based on a true story. I learned he was a sled dog who helped pull life-saving diphtheria vaccines to an illness-ravaged Nome, Alaska, back in 1925. This was significant because no other form of transportation was available during the harsh Alaskan winter. Balto spent his later years at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and, upon his death in 1933, found permanent residence here.

As mentioned, this was a smaller museum, and I managed to get through it in about an hour. The main reason I wanted to come was to see their monster fish fossils, specifically Dunkleosteus. Ohio, as well as where I live in Illinois, was once under an ancient ocean. The main predator was the armored fish, Dunkleosteus. There’s a specimen at the Field Museum, but this one had several on display, including a life-sized recreation hanging from the ceiling. Usually, the giant shark, Megalodon, gets all the attention when it comes to ancient sea horrors, so it was nice seeing Dunkleosteus swim into the limelight for a change.

Other scary-looking fish include Xiphactinus and a Coelacanth. The former has been extinct for 65 million years, while the latter was believed extinct for that same period until a living specimen was discovered in a fishing net in 1938. Fans of the horror host, Svengoolie, may remember seeing this fish play a pivotal role in his presentation of Monster on the Campus (1958). In this film, exposure to the blood of a dead Coelacanth turns humans and animals into prehistoric monsters. This included an unfortunate German Shepherd dog who ended up with fangs and a penchant for killing.

Aside from Balto, the only thing on display here that I couldn’t see in Chicago is a replica of “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old early hominin (a member of the family that includes modern humans). Bones of this specimen were discovered in 1974 by Cleveland paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. The actual bones are on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

The specimen was named “Lucy” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which the excavation crew was playing nonstop at the time.

With some to kill before it was time for my hotel check-in, I went back to my list and dug out one of my alternate pitstops. First up was a bookstore called Parallel Universe Books, which I’d discovered on YouTube. This independently owned shop features horror, science fiction, and fantasy. The owner was very nice and showed off his 3-D-printed ROM, the Space Night, that he’d created for himself (and not for sale). Any regular readers of this blog now that I am a huge fan of MARVEL’s ROM comic and the two of us discussed the character for about 15 minutes before I resumed looking at books. I did end up finding one that I was in my AMAZON cart at a comparable price, Ronald Malfi’s “The Hive.”

My next stop had been at the bottom of my sightseeing list, but it would prove to be one of the highlights of this trip. It sounds strange telling people that they should run out and visit a cemetery, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland is the most amazing cemetery I have ever visited, which is really saying something since I had only heard of it a couple of days before. I would be so impressed that I would return the following morning for a second visit, this time with my good Canon SLR camera for photography.

I made it to the hotel, which was a little rundown, but the people were nice. I had packed dinner and spent the rest of the night in my room reading. It had been a busy day, but there was so much more ground to cover.

Coming up…The Angel of Death Victorious

~Dave