Cincinnati to Columbus is a 90-minute drive and it didn't take me much longer than that, with only one stop in Mason Ohio for Taco Bell.

For a place only four hours from home, I'd only been to Columbus twice previously. Once on a couples' road trip to see the Bruins/Blue Jackets, and another time to ride the Ohio State University like 20 years ago. Both of those quick trips left plenty of gaps in my Columbus knowledge, but those gaps were going to remain today as my target was only three minutes off I-71.

The destination today was Cooper Stadium.

Cooper Stadium was built as a home for the Columbus Red Birds, a minor league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals already had a farm club in Rochester, but their search for a second minor league team led them to the financially distressed Columbus Senators. The team was purchased and rebranded with the Red Birds nickname of the major league Cardinals.

Using the stadium plans they already possessed from building Silver Stadium in Rochester in 1929, Cooper Stadium was constructed as a clone ballpark in 1931. Which is pretty funny because I've visited the newer (1997) ballpark in Rochester and wished they would have kept the old stadium around. Visiting Cooper Stadium was allowing me to go back in time in a way.

The Red Birds stuck around until 1955, when losing seasons and the growing popularity of televised baseball led to poor attendance and the club leaving for Omaha. They were immediately replaced with a relocated team from Ottawa, which lasted until 1970 as the Columbus Jets.

Columbus was without professional baseball and Cooper Stadium sat dormant for six years, until finally AAA-baseball came to town with the Columbus Clippers, affiliate of the New York Yankees.

As minor league baseball can't have any old stadiums, the reaper came for Cooper Stadium in the 2000s as Columbus moved on and built the shiny Huntington Park. I've never been to Huntington Park, but it seems like a nice enough place to see a game.

Cooper Stadium's last baseball game saw 16,770 people show up for a 3-0 loss to Toledo.

Before Huntington Park even opened in 2009, a plan was presented to turn Cooper Stadium into a racetrack. City council approved the zoning change and in 2014, two-thirds of the stadium was demolished and only the area behind third base was left standing. A picture from 1983 shows the entire stadium and you can now see how the remaining part could be use for racing grandstands.

Years would pass and with that plan in limbo, another plan came out to renovate Cooper Stadium into the permanent home of Ohio High School Athletic Association outdoor events (football, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, etc.). This was supposed to cost $22-million but also never came to fruition.

Today the site is surrounded by shipping containers stacked two high, as a new owner is using these containers for storage and to really keep out trespassers and the homeless. If I had Mr. Beast money, I'd fly in some of the best urbex climbers I know and see how they'd deal with such a deterrent, haha.

(I'm also happy my rubenesque self didn't need to try and scale 17 feet of shipping container.)

Anyway, the new owners are looking to build mixed-use retail, two apartment buildings, warehouse space, and lastly, maybe turn the standing portion of Cooper Stadium into an amphitheatre.

With only one third of the stadium still standing, and this not exactly being Tiger Stadium or Comiskey, I didn't have high hopes for Cooper Stadium becoming anything more than rubble down at the landfill.

I did have higher hopes and dreams for the stunning Cooper Stadium ticket office out front. Even if Cooper Stadium never makes financial sense to renovate, the ticket office is gorgeous and looks well sealed. Preserving and reusing this building would be a great way to honour the history of the stadium and create an interesting future landmark (if they don't successfully convert the stadium into an amphitheatre).

Cooper Stadium is more historic than just your average AAA ballpark too. It's one of approximately a half-dozen stadiums still standing which played host to the Negro Leagues. From 1931 to 1933, the Columbus Blue Birds played here at Cooper Stadium (then Red Bird Stadium). Leroy Morney won the batting title in 1932, while his teammate Jabbo Andrews was one of his main competitors.

Unfortunately, the Blue Birds disbanded in 1933 and the players were merged into the Akron Tyrites roster.

As much as I know it hurts the overall historic feel of Cooper Stadium, I couldn't help but also like this brutalist gate, haha.

Back when I got off the highway for Cooper Stadium, I didn't know what to expect and that nervousness grew as I saw a couple of other people on the property. Thankfully they were just gawkers like me, who craned their necks and tried to take pictures through the chain link fence. They pointed out a fence hole to each other, but agreed that they weren't going inside.

Inside, I liked the cement ramps and steel handrails that reminded me of Wrigley Field. At the same time, this underbelly felt small for a stadium with 15,000 seats for baseball.

A user on Reddit posted about the time he tried to come here, where as soon as he got past a certain point on the property, the loudest alarm he had ever heard started going off. I was happy that wasn't the case today.

Hoping that Cooper Stadium would still be here the next time I'm in Columbus, I made my way back to the car and right back onto the highway. There was a hockey game in Erie Pennsylvania tonight and I still had 3.5 hours of driving to go.

Except that there wasn't a hockey game.

The sunny day had turned to snow and bleakness as I curved around Cleveland, then followed the coast up to the biggest Pennsylvanian town on Lake Erie. My room was at the Avalon Hotel, a place hanging on that opened as the Hilton in 1977. The lobby was dark and dated and had the decor of a rundown casino or strip club (mirrors, carpet, ancient light fixtures).

With a sketchy mix of reviews, I was pleased to walk into my room and find a perfectly acceptable space. Sitting down on the bed to check if the game started at 7 or 730, apparently it started at 4pm? Oh shit I better get going! Wait, the game is in Kitchener? I paused and thought about how I'm not that stupid to confuse which team is the home team.

I discovered that due to the rising threat of the Omicron Variant, the decision was made to change the home-and-home series with Kitchener to playing both games in Kitchener. The Erie players could come and go as they please as American residents, but things were far more tricky for the Kitchener Rangers if they travelled to Erie and caught Covid.

So since the Erie Otters were already in Kitchener for yesterday's game, they simply played another game in Kitchener at an empty arena. This saved the Rangers players from the risk of possibly having to quarantine after crossing back into Canada.

I couldn't believe it. And with the announcement being made two days prior, this was a lesson I needed to learn - to follow the team's social media accounts prior to travelling to games (and then unfollow them immediately after).

I was bitter to the point where I only took ten photos total and I can't remember the last time I travelled to a city and took so few photos. This was a city I really like too, this wasn't Moncton or Ann Arbor or something, this was Erie Pennsylvania.

Numerous factors bummed me out. I really enjoy going to junior hockey games, this would have checked off one more OHL team, and Erie's rink isn't some new sterile event space as it was built in 1983. This is all true, but the number one thing that bothered me was the missed opportunity. I have this feeling of needing to milk everything out of my mainland time due to living on an island, but Covid ramped that up to a whole new level. And today in driving from Cincinnati to Erie, there were so many sporting events (or Ohio county courthouses) that I could have checked out if I just logged into my email or followed the Erie Otters/Kitchener Rangers on social media.

Instead, it was a dreary night in a former Hilton in Erie Pennsylvania watching a Patrick Swayze marathon.

It didn't help that I was excited to head out to a nearby sports bar for dinner and there was some gawking as I was one of the few people wearing a mask. Then for food, I thought "hey I'm in Pennsylvania, maybe it's the whole state that knows how to make a solid cheesesteak??" - which wasn't true here in Erie. The cheesesteak fell right into that category of bland, mediocre cheesesteaks you'd get if you tried to order one at some place like Applebee's.

The next day I got an early start with a stop at a local Erie institution called Mighty Fine Donuts. I was now getting around to more of the town and feeling better.

I was up early because I needed to cover two hours of driving today by the early afternoon. A couple of planned stops would also add to my travel time.

One last thing in Erie though, as my last time here I failed to get the three lighthouses that stand in the city. One was easy enough as it was a memorable stone sentinel in a neighbourhood, but then I set out on Erie's sandy peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie, home to Presque Isle State Park and two more lighthouses.

Except by only doing enough research to know there were "two lighthouses to capture out on Presque Isle", I was fooled because there's an Erie Waterworks intake pipe access point that's shaped like a lighthouse. This caused me to completely miss the stunning 1857 Erie Harbor Pierhead Lighthouse (above) and get awfully frustrated once I got home and reread the Northwest Pennsylvania Lighthouse Directory index page.

This was one of those great lighthousing times with absolutely no one else out on this pier or even in the parking lot. It was just me out here, enjoying the calm isolated tranquility. The weather set the mood perfectly too, as it was just cool enough and just windy enough to feel right for an old lighthouse in a blue collar, rust belt city in January.

This was a hell of a first lighthouse visit for 2022.

The end of the pier behind the lighthouse and Lake Erie beyond.

If it wasn't so wet, there was even a spot to ride!

Taking advantage of safely leaving my bike and computer back in the hotel room, upon return I actually thought to take some skyline shots.

Writing this in 2025, it's really odd to me that a cancelled game could have made me so sour that it derailed doing one of my favourite things in life (getting a budget hotel in the downtown of a mid-sized American city). I guess the lesson is to try and let unfortunate things go that are outside your control.

It was time to bid adieu to my (at one time) Hilton Hotel and head northeast into New York State.

It's a good thing I bid adieu too, as the Avalon Hotel closed soon after my visit. Two years later, a renovation from a New York investor was announced that would turn the former hotel into a "a 197-unit affordable housing workforce apartment complex" with ground floor retail.

One thing I love is that the CEO of the Erie County Redevelopment Authority is quoted in the article saying of my beloved hotel where I stayed, "The Avalon has sat empty, decaying right in the center of our city. It's an eyesore. I don't think anyone would say anything less."

LOL. I didn't know something could become an eyesore so quickly - or wait, what? Was it an eyesore when I stayed there?

Continue to Part 3...