Cleveland: Ohio Burlesque Festival

 I generally don't apply to many burlesque festivals, but I applied to Ohio's so I could visit my sister! Cleveland was definitely a pleasant surprise - I really underestimated it - and Lake Erie is gorgeous. 

This blog is really more for travel musings, but I've been doing burlesque full time since 2021, and making my own costumes for decades. Above is one of my favorites! 

Baltimore Streetcar Museum

This past weekend I found myself on a casual and inadvertent streetcar tour through some of my old college haunts. Walking through Bolton Hill, my partner and I stumbled across a piece of old track on Linden Street... Apparently this pagoda was moved here just to keep people from driving on the street. If you look through it, you can see a side of the track. We concluded later that this probably would have been part of Route #32 in the early 20th century. 

After that, we wandered our way over to the Howard Street Bridge for art supplies, then made our way down the steps to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum. It was wonderful learning about how interconnected we once were before the automotive industry drove society and global health into the ground. So much of American individualism manifests in our relationship with cars, and it's disappointing that Baltimore has gone over 20 years without any substantial updates to its public transportation infrastructure. Either way, everyone at the museum is very well-acquainted with the transit system and history of Baltimore. Here are the photos!

Interior of green streetcar (originally horse-drawn):

SEPTA streetcar...

Aforementioned green streetcar:

On the walk home, we passed Penn Station and decided to see how far we could get by rail - Miami and New Orleans? Crazy! And 30+ hours... no thank you. I wish Amtrak had genuinely affordable night train options like I got to experience from Berlin to Budapest!