day 17 - toronto, ontario to cleveland, ohio

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temp: cold and raining.

woke this morning feeling like absolute rubbish. woke up at 7am as we had bags to coach at 7:45am. scrambled all my stuff together and grabbed an apple off the reception counter on the way out where we heard shared everyones stories and photos from the night before.

after anina and i left the others did too, only they lost each other.

toronto had two hilton garden inns for some reason, and travis ended up at the wrong one.
mary lost everyone so she cabbed it back by herself.
and mel lost everyone too and had no money on her so got a local couple to drop her off the hotel.

we also found out the ryan, who had been sick for the last few days (he went to the doctors back in montreal and they said he had tonsillitis) well apparently he was coughing up blood over night so he'd gone to the hospital, poor guy.

we drove for about and hour and a half before arriving at the canada/usa border where we had to go through and get our passports checked. there was a group of about 7 of us that didnt have greencards in our passports as we all flew into LAX with Air New Zealand. I remember at the time i thought it was strange but i had heard them mention that they were trialing something with LAX so we didnt need one. Not according to these guys.
we explained to them what was said before they finally made some phone calls and said we could re-enter usa...thank god, canada has been way too expensive.
we did get to go through duty free here too, it was so cheap. i got two necklaces by swarovski for less than one back home. and we bought some chocolate etc to spend the last of our canadian dollars.. yay, back to having only one currency on my purse.

we drove for about another 2hours, this i once again slept for before we stopped in a little town called Eerie for lunch. The maccas $1menu was back on so majority of us had that. It was funny, while I was waiting in line at maccas a song came on and I start singing, only to realize it was Australian singer Kate Miller Heidke, on US radio… good work by her, the aussies are popping up all over the airways over here.
We stayed here for about 45minutes before getting back on the bus for about 90 or so minutes til we arrived in Cleveland, Ohio.

We arrived in Cleveland around 3:15pm and we were dropped at the Rock’n’Roll hall of fame.

This place was really good, shame you’re not allowed to take photos in there! Its choc-o-block with memorabilia, everything from some of Elvis’s outfits, to John Lennon’s piano, to Michael Jacksons Thriller mask and jacket and more. We stayed here til 5pm when we got picked up and taken to our hotel, the Comfort Inn.

Dinner time came round and it had started raining so instead of going down the road we went two shops down from out hotel to Subway.

Cleveland is a very strange city. It’s so quiet, there is hardly anyone here. Apparently its really hard to get work here, seriously its like being in a ghost town. Its now been nicknamed Mistake on the Lake as literally empty and it’s a shame because it really is quite a pretty city.

After dinner we just did some swapping of photos and am now just about to head to bed, and its only 10pm. Some of the others have gone bowling or to the movies, we thought we’d rest up for our last two nights with our contiki buddies in Chicago before jetting off to meet up with Ron in Las Vegas.

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Comments

[Carl]

Blimey! Coughing up blood? That's taking the "Contiki cough" to a whole new level! Poor guy :o(

[Lauren]

$1 menu .. bahahhaa