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| A Coyote in the woods. |
I am sorry I have not posted for a while, I find it really hard to keep the blog up to date over the summer time, there is so many things to do and see and not enough time to spend on writing blogs (although this excuse doesn't really stand up, as I have found plenty of time to stare at the computer screen and rekindle my love of championship manager 2007!).
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| Have I been arrested? |
The weather has undergone a wonderful transformation over the last few months, August has been gloriously sunny with just enough summer storms to keep things cool. I wasn't so happy with things around my birthday however, when our air conditioner decided to become as effective as a chocolate teapot and had to be replaced, thank goodness we did not have to pay for it - at least not in cash - though we certainly paid for it in other ways. The temperature outside was in the 90s, and the apartment was instantly transformed into the Mojave desert thanks to the sunshine pouring through the large windows we have running the entire length of the apartment and practically baking us alive. It is fixed now and the annoying thing is you know that in a few weeks we would do anything to be so warm, as the windows have the opposite effect in the winter time, graciously allowing all the heat to rapidly leave our apartment. Except for the faulty air conditioner I had a great birthday, Amanda made me the most delicious cake in the morning and then we went to walk it off with a nice stroll through the woods to find some caves!
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| My cake! |
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| It was as delicious as it looked! |
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| Amanda floating at the waterfall |
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| Is this the first sign of Autumn? or do I mean fall? |
So you may have noticed the title of this blog.... well don't worry (or unfortunately!) I have not been arrested, although Amanda did take me to prison for my birthday. Amanda and I both have a not so secret soft spot for the TV show Ghost Adventures and as we were looking for a fun day trip decided to follow in the footsteps of Zack, possibly the greatest ghost explorer of our generation, We went to Moundsville, West Virginia to visit the old state penitentiary and wow! What an amazing place! After a long car journey, made longer due to a failure of the sat nav system at a critical juncture (or possibly this was a ghost, sapping all the energy from the phone to enable it to appear as an appirition in front of us later in the day?) and several arguments later the West Virginia penitentiary finally came into view. The imposing structure seems to loom over the town and does bring on a sense of real foreboding. This sense is only deepened when you walk inside the prison and are greeted by Old Sparky, the old electric chair responsible for 8 executions before it was deemed inhumane as a form of capital punishment. How death by lethal injection or the idea of capital punishment in general can possibly be considered humane is beyond me, but that is for another day.
We had an excellent guide showing us round who positively beamed at the prospect of the of the stories he had in store for us, One of my stories happened during one of the many riots and involved an officer being cooked in a huge pot of beans, He was busy cooking a massive pot of baked beans in the kitchen when the riot started and one of the inmates decided this was the prefect opportunity to push him into the pot and put the lid on!! Here are some pictures from our trip, including a potential ghost sighting, can you spot the ghost?
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| The West Virginia Penitentiary |
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| Possible evidence of ghosts? |
In a continuation of the rather morbid theme Amanda and myself also visited the Lakeview Cemetery on the East side of the city last week. It is a really incredibly and extremely large place that one morning just can't do justice too and we shall definitely visit again! During the early parts of the 20th Century Cleveland truly was a great place of wealth and opulence and this is on show all around the Lakeview cemetery which is home to the family plots for many of the cities leading and richest families. The highlight of the cemetery is definitely the Garfield memorial, President from 1881 until his assasination later in the year. The Memorial was built with no expense spared to rival any in Washington DC and is a really beautiful, ornately decorated monument as the pictures below show.
View from the top of the Garfield Memorial.
I also included here a picture of the Rockefeller Obelisk and a picture of a nice little chapel, in which everything in the interior was designed by the Tiffany company of New York City
I have got myself some time off over the next week as Laura, Tim, Ali and Charlotte from England are coming out to see me! I cant wait to see them and have got a zillion things planned, it is going to be a lot of fun :D
P.S Laura and Tim are currently embarking on a trip around the world... without flying! They are going to be using all manner of transport including camper vans and cargo ships to get them from A to B and have given themselves 80 weeks to do it! I am extremely jealous of them, it sounds like a lot of fun! They have their own blog and you can read about there adventures here... https://aroundtheworldineightyweeks.wordpress.com/
