A favorite: Lake Erie Bluffs

This post is dedicated to my 10-year CLE-anniversary, which is this week on May 2, 2024. 

On May 2, 2014, my husband and I drove my then 16-month old daughter from Brooklyn to Cleveland to start a new life chapter. We took with us a decade of New York City memories. I had accepted a job that required me to start two months earlier than we had planned to move. My husband dropped my daughter and I and the car off with his parents and then flew back to NYC to finish his job commitment before joining us on July 1.

I have two memories from my early months in Cleveland when I distinctly remember thinking, I can be happy here. One was taking my daughter to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. After our visit, she was running around in Wade Oval, an open expanse of grass and trees in the middle of University Circle, a hub of cultural institutions in Cleveland – the Natural History Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and the Case Western Reserve University campus among others. There was sun, and deeply green early summer grass.  She was romping and falling and investigating as all toddlers do. It felt good, and right, and promising.

The other memory is driving out to Lake Erie Bluffs, a park about 30 miles east of Cleveland in Lake County.

The park offers several different ways to experience Lake Erie. There is a gravel trail sitting atop the bluffs, running at a height above the shoreline that is best for a meandering walk, not a rigorous one. It’s an opportunity to feel breezes and look out over the water. Perhaps notice the different colors of the lake. Perhaps just listen to the water’s movement that day.

At one end of the trail is a 50-foot tall coastal observation tower. At the top you can look out over Lake Erie. Looking east, downtown Cleveland is visible in the distance. Looking south, you can see acres of marshland abutting the park. Looking north is nothing by the expanse of Lake Erie. 

Near the observation tower is a trail down to the water and 9,000 feet of shoreline. The beach can be of varying width depending on the lake levels, which change yearly and sometimes seasonally. My girls love puttering around on this strip of sand, rocks, branches and driftwood. 

It’s hard for me to believe, but I now have pictures from Lake Erie Bluffs over the span of a decade. An early visit in 2015 when we were just a family of three. A “date” with my older daughter in 2018 when she was still adjusting to life after her younger sister was born in 2017. A visit as a family during the pandemic lockdown months of 2020. A visit alone in September 2022 that I referenced in my prior blog post about walking along the water. A “date” with my younger daughter in 2023 while her older sister was away at sleepaway camp.

Of course, so many things have happened, and changed, and grown, and evolved in the ten years of our life since May 2014. And there are things that have moved, and shifted, and eroded, and appeared at the park in that time. But the place is still there. The lake is still there. That feels good, and right, and promising.