I was heading to Wooster Ohio for the Operetta Festival at the  College of Wooster where I was going to five operettas [one Austrian, one English and three American] and a special gala performance of "Nine operettas in 90 minutes" that the Ohio Light Opera Company was presenting. The English one was an operetta you see over and over again, HMS Pinafore; there was one that's never performed: The Queen's Lace Handkerchief; a staple American operetta/musical, The Music Man; and two American operettas in the European style, one seldom heard,  The Firefly, and one very famous, The New Moon.

I picked up the rental car [Chevrolet Maxx, 6 cylinder] at Reagan National Airport on Sunday and left Monday before 6am; except for the section near Washington, there was light traffic and few trucks until Ohio; even then there still were relatively few trucks to Wooster.

From Frederick to Cumberland you go through hilly but not mountainous land, around 1,000 to 1,200 feet. After Cumberland and from the first part of West Virginia to Pennsylvania, the land is still undulating but it's now in the 2,400 feet range. As you leave Pennsylvania and go back into West Virginia, there's a very steep ridge right before Wheeling at the Ohio River.

 After 425 miles reached Wooster and the Hilton Garden Inn  around 2:30 pm. The hotel has free wireless internet, large cold rooms, and I'd recommend it.

Wooster  is a compact city of 25,000 to 28,000, almost all residential; it's an hour and a half south of Cleveland and an hour and a half east of Columbus. The older houses from the 19th and early 20th centuries are large bungalow types, the newer ones ranch houses. Except in the very middle of the city there's an open feeling to the residential streets without them feeling suburban and isolated. The layout and style are something like north Asheville but with far more trees and tree lined streets and with a more open feeling. The city ends very abruptly except for a stretch along the Lincoln Highway, Highway 30, which is the commercial slurb. 

The city has two focal points, the town square ["Public Square"] and the college. [The other college Ohio State University Agricultural  is on the outskirts near where my motel was.] The square [Liberty and Market Streets] is something like the squares in smaller Pennsylvania cities like Chambersburg but somewhat larger and with extra nooks and crannies. It's towered over by a court house that's impressive and which looks completely out of place. It's from the 1870s with the lower floors looking like Prussian Gründerzeit style, including huge male caryatids and atlases  flanking the doors, and the upper floors in French Second Empire style. The 60? 80? foot tower can be seen from the edge of the city.

Like almost every medium and small American city, all commercial life has been sucked out of it by the malls and strips outside the city limits. Downtown Wooster doesn't look shabby or dangerous in the least but has little commercial activity. What had been the commercial center looks like it ran about 4 blocks in one direction and about 6 blocks in the other. Freedlander's Department Store a small local department store [same name as the name of the theater where the operettas are given]; two coffee houses, one of which closes at 6pm, one at 1 am; two upscale restaurants and 2 downscale restaurants.

After a shower I went over for a snack to the main square to the Hungarian Tulipan Hungarian Pastry & Coffee Shop, for a small open-faced Hungarian pepper and cheese sandwich and iced tea [the temperature was in the middle 90s and humid].   It's very attractive inside with marble topped tables and Mitteleuropäisch cafe bentwood chairs. Tea and coffee are served with the right utensils of good quality; the silverware and plates and the presentation of the food are professional, caring, sophisticated. Two thirds of what they offer is Torten and pastries and 1/3 is open faced Hungarian sandwiches.  all served and presented on simple but elegant white chinaware. [Unfortunately the cafe has no website.]

Back at the hotel reception desk later that afternoon I heard that power had failed in most of the city; since it didn't affect the hotel [about 1 mile outside the city limit] I didn't pay too much attention to the details.

There's a chain restaurant, Bob Evans, about a half mile from the hotel and I decided to eat supper there, since it was close and I wasn't particularly hungry. I should have been alerted by the packed parking lot but wasn't. The place was jammed with people spilling out the door but I got a seat almost immediately at the counter where I had a breakfast meal that took forever. Paying at the cashier I found out that the power failure had closed every restaurant in the city and anybody who was eating out, had only one choice: Bob Evans.

Tuesday, the next day was the start of the series of shows I was seeing but they wouldn't begin until the matinee. Last year I had spent the mornings driving the small roads around the Ohio Dutch country; this year it was so hot I decided instead to visit a different nearby city each morning and spend as little time as possible outdoors.

This morning I drove to Canton, Ohio [79,000 people and slowly declining in number] which used to be famous as a major industrial city [Timkin Roller Bearings] but now is known for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The drive there was an eye opener.

It's about 25 miles from Wooster on Route 30 [the Lincoln Highway] which is four lanes separated by an unusually wide median. The road wasn't empty but the traffic was so light and the vistas so open you could drive without paying much attention. Nothing at all like driving from Washington to Baltimore or Washington to Annapolis.

Going into the city you see many abandoned industrial sites and the general impression is of an old and worn out manufacturing city. As I drove into the downtown, the first thing I saw was a blood plasma bank; then a drug rehabilitation center with a group of people standing around it. Two blocks further is the main street.

Each of the city downtowns I visited this trip had the same traits: important and thriving economic centers in the past [ending maybe 30? 40? years ago]; enormous amount of tax payer funds put into infrastructure downtown: special sidewalk designs, fountains, planters, street furniture; and little economic activity. Instead of private stores and businesses that generate jobs and money, there are "social" institutions: municipal ballet society, health clinics, DMV offices. They're all important but they dominate the downtowns and don't provide the economic lift to bring them back very quickly.

Canton's downtown section [office buildings and department store buildings and banks - all from the 1920s] is about 5 blocks by 5 blocks. At the end of the downtown area is a former movie palace, Palace Theater   which appears not to operate daily or even weekly but only for special events. The big attraction, the Pro Football Hall of Fame   , is actually on the edge of the city and focussed on an interstate highway exit.

In Canton at 11 am on a workday there were almost no people on the streets. There were two or three restaurants and cafes but only one was open: the coffee house I went into fronts on the main street but you can't get into it from the street; you have to enter it through a private entrance off of an office building lobby. It was Carpe Diem, a pleasant setting but like a million other non-chain coffee houses.

Got back to Wooster at 1:15, changed clothes and went to the Friedlander Theater on the campus for the first of the five operettas, Johann Strauß' Das Spitzentuch der Königin / The Queen's Lace Handkerchief from 1880.  The theater where the operetta festival takes place is on the college campus of the College of Wooster about ¾ mile from the main square and runs about a half mile in each direction. It's architecture is nice but not spectacular. But what is unusually good is how they handled new buildings on  campus. Many American college campuses have a beautiful original section which is surrounded by cheap looking new buildings that are out of scale and out of style with the original buildings. The University of Virginia is an a really bad example of this. Wooster's new buildings, however, are in the correct scale and in matching or same materials as the original buildings and the whole is a unified composition.   

I'd never seen The Queen's Lace Handkerchief and had never even seen it listed in the repertoires of German and Austrian theaters; I knew nothing about the music or the plot which turned out to be set in Lisbon in 1570 where the 18 year old king of Portugal and his 16 year old queen are being manipulated in a regency designed to have Phillip II of Spain [whose portrait by Velasquez provided one of the backdrops] take Portugal over.

I had read in a biography of Strauß that he had no talent for, understanding of or interest in the theater; what he wanted to do was write music. He regarded plot and dialogue and characters as annoyances that he had to put up with. That trait certainly showed in this show.

The music was new [to me] except for one theme which I think was the basis of the waltz "Roses from the South"; but the music was interesting and was played well and professionally by the orchestra of 20 members. The chorus numbers, as is usual with this company, were not good but great. The soloists were good to very good singers and generally not very good actors.

The only bad thing was the physical relationship of the main singers to their roles/characters. I know you can't expect actors to match their parts physically perfectly but this was really extreme. The 16 year old queen, for example, was played by a woman who either was in her late 30s or at least looked like that and whose figure was extremely matronly; the 18 year old king was played by an actor who could have been in his [late] 20s but whose body looked very old and middle age-ish. Only the secondary roles and chorus matched looks up with their parts.

Maybe for a straight play or a standard musical you have so many talented and trained people available who can perform a role well, that you're able to be picky and choosy about physical appearance. Perhaps the number of available people who have classically trained voices [there's no miking] in the right range is so small, that producers don't have the luxury of selecting among 5 or 10 equally good candidates for a role .

The sets and costumes were fine and, as I said, the choral work was beyond good. The finale was especially impressive. I saw it as a well done professional production of a mediocre operetta. I'm glad I saw it but I suspect I'll never see it again [and suspect that the chances of it being done again, even in Europe, are pretty slim].

Towards the end of the last act, the electricity failed in the city yet again and part of the show had to be performed with the stage work lights powered by an emergency generator.

It was interesting that the cast list was done in the European way: by rank with the King at the top, and not by order of appearance or by order of importance of role.  

After the show I had supper at the at the Wooster Inn: chicken dumpling soup and a Cobb salad. The food was good and the air conditioning was back on in the restaurant but there was so much heat every where else I had little appetite. It was a pleasant setting, very good atmosphere and slick service. The restaurant overlooks the college golf course and I was in the garden room which had a 180 degree view. 

 There was no show that night and since I was strangely tired I read and watched television in the hotel room and went to bed early.

Wednesday morning I started off around 9 am for Mansfield Ohio, about 40 miles west of Wooster on US 30.  As you drive into the city, you don't see a decaying industrial city as in Canton; Mansfield's a tired former agricultural processing city with grain elevators and mills, most of which look under utilized or even abandoned.

Mansfield is smaller than Canton, 51,000 people vs 79,000, but the population is actually going up. The city, compared to Canton, is more open. Driving into it, the town seems sprawling and it turned out that there are actually two downtowns, although very close to each other.

Again you can see the results of a lot of tax money put into the downtown: fountains, tree planting, flower boxes and beds. But again, most of the activity was state and city government and non profit groups that don't bring much money or jobs to the economy. What really struck my eye were the banners flying everywhere for the special festival time: Child Support Payment Week.

Like Canton [and like Wooster] the center of the city is a square. This one, however, is a double square: there's a relatively large [one block by one block] and attractive tree filled park surrounded by a second square where the stores and commercial life is/used to be. The big tourist attraction in Canton is the football museum, while in Mansfield it's the Johnny Appleseed story  since Mansfield was the center of his base of operations.

The proportion of money-making job-producing places is noticeably higher than in Canton but the city still looks like it's dependent on tax money being pumped into it. The actual main square isn't that lively; a few restaurants, one of which was where I bought an Ohio lottery ticket that didn't win, and what seemed to be an outlet of The Bratwurst Ltd., a local bratwurst factory that was grilling and selling its food outdoors on the street.

There's also the Eat More Bundt Company, a store devoted exclusively to bundt cakes. It has only a small customer area and from looking at its website I'd guess it's main business is mail order and catering to restaurants, not small retail sales.There were the usual bundt cakes you'd expect, but in a dozen different flavors, most of which I'd never heard of - see box at the right; but there also were odd things. Like bundt wedding cakes and the two miniature bundt cakes I bought: one inch wide and one inch high. If you want a bundt cake, I'd suggest trying their mail order service 

]

The bigger proportion of businesses seemed to be on a street that runs two or three blocks from the main square into a second commercial area: The Carrousel [with 2 "R"s] Business District.  As you continue walking down the street you hit the second business district, Carrussel. The carousel itself is new. According to the sign at it s entrance it was built "in 1991 as the first new, hand- carved carrousel to be built and operated in the United States since the 1930's". 

 Then the other main commercial street runs off at a right angle, lined with mercantile buildings from the late 19th century; unfortunately only one side of the street remains; the other was demolished and is now a parking lot.

Since eating or drinking at  the Twisted Fig would be cutting things too close, I had an iced tea at the Sweet Basil Eatery back on the main square. It's a mixture of a restaurant, coffee house and souvenir store in what looks like might have been a former 5 and 10 or a department store. 

The clientele in each of the half dozen places I was in was almost exclusively middle aged to old, looking local and looking very white. The people I saw hanging out on the street in Canton had been almost all white; here that kind of person was still majority white but with a lot more African Americans. I noticed no Asians or Latin Americans in either city. Canton is shown as 74% European American and 20% African American while Mansfield is listed with almost the same proportions 76% and 18%.

I especially noticed something about the gregariousness and openness of the locals that week because of an experience a friend of mine had had two weeks earlier. He was travelling in the upper Midwest and was surprised that the locals didn't meet the stereotype of the outgoing slap-on-the-back Americans that mid westerners are supposed to be. They were polite but business-like. He was trying hard to make contacts and to have conversations.

I, on the other hand, wasn't too interested in meeting the people on my trip but kept having them intruding on me. Conversations seemed to go on forever; they asked questions about me and some of them were telling me parts of their life stories. It was the same in all the cities I visited [except Akron where I didn't get out of the car].

Very easy drive back to Wooster to change and get to the matinee performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore.

Probably the least lavish physical production of any of the shows but still good production values. Chorus and orchestral work were very good; [music sample links and here] the acting and buffoonery not so good. Josephine's English, even when singing solo and me being in the second row, was difficult to understand. In addition Josephine was sung by a mezzo soprano and I dislike mezzo soprano voices; [and when I looked the operetta up, I was right: Josephine is supposed to be sung by a soprano].

[One of my friends who teaches German at a university makes a point of telling people who want to be German majors that they would be better served with a double major, German and something "money making" like economics  or business. I was reminded of that in reading the blurb on the actor/singer playing Bill Bobstay  who is  "pursuing a double degree in music ... and political science"  at the University of Utah.]

Reviews are displayed around the walls of the theater which I avoid reading until I've seen the last show I'm going to. One common thread through most of the reviews was the poor diction / intelligibility of the English of the singers. I think they noted it more this time than last year either because the diction really was poorer or, maybe, because all but one of the shows was originally written in English .

There were some strange staging elements in this HMS Pinafore: when Buttercup [in this production thin not fat] goes into the bumboat, she holds her nose as if she's going into water instead of down into a boat; and there was an extra character, a 4 or 5 year old admiral [maybe the child of one of the cast?].

People who like Gilbert and Sullivan have the reputation of being somewhat abnormal in the depth of their interest. From conversations around me I could hear that many in the audience had attended ALL the productions of Pinafore this summer and a woman sitting next to me kept joining in the songs until a woman behind her shushed her up, They seem to be something like Grateful Deadheads following a tour.

The performance began with the audience being asked to stand and sing God Save the Queen; when I've been at theaters in London that did it [I think very few do any more] I didn't mind. But perhaps because of the debate about illegal immigration going on, I was annoyed by it this time.

This performance was only about 80% sold. Last year all the shows were sold out but this year only one was; the others were mostly in the 85% range but one was only 2/3rds sold. The audience was still old, 80% old couples, over 60, over 70, even older, but were not dressed  as formally as last year. Maybe the extra 5 or 6 degrees of heat made the difference.  Only one woman wore evening dresses for a  night performances [she was European].

Between shows I went for supper  to Buehler's, a very large supermarket in the middle of Wooster, that has an attached restaurant. The meal was fake prime rib and sorry side salad served slowly in a 1/3 filled restaurant. I won't go back.

Then back to the theater for the evening performance, Rudolf Friml's The Firefly from 1912. A really odd theatrical  experience.

When the overture started I immediately thought: "Musicals Tonight!"  , the group in Manhattan that puts on musicals mostly from the teens and twenties that are seldom performed. The arrangement and style of the overture were just like what you hear with that group, when it does its musical comedies. That was an indication that the show was somewhat strange. Friml was a classically trained Bohemian composer who came to the US when he was already established as a musician. He adapted to our culture and some of what you hear by him is [old] American pop. But he also wrote classical operettas and this show mixed the two together.

The plot was even looser than in most operettas: Nina, an 18 year old immigrant Italian girl street singer dresses as a boy to join a church choir being transported by yacht to Bermuda; the female member of a wealthy WASP couple was instantly and extremely jealous of the girl/boy in whom the male member falls in love.

Thee is one famous number, Love is Like a Firefly, that most people recognize and one, Giannina Mia, that everyone knows, even if they don't know the titles of the songs. Both songs are in the operetta style but set into one of the musical comedy acts.

The first act, in Manhattan boarding the Van Dare family's private yacht, was basically an American musical comedy, the second act, on the Bermuda estate, a European operetta edging into opera, and the third act back to an American musical. Except that operetta also popped up in the musical sections and musicals popped up in the operetta section; especially noticeable when the third act, which was mostly musical comedy, closed with a finale that was not like operetta but like opera.

The stage sets were good with the Woolworth Tower and the Singer Building on the skyline and so were the chorus numbers. The [good] costumes were nowhere  from 1912 but from 1925, if not from 1935. The characters kept changing their personalities and the relative importance of characters was different and changing throughout the acts.

[There were several references to "Tommy Atkins" outfits and "Tommy Atkins" caps which I didn't understand. When I looked it up later, I found out that Tommy Atkins is parallel to the American "GI", for ordinary soldier/sailor.]

Nina, who had been really good as a lady in waiting in Das Spitzentuch der Königin sang well but had really bad diction . This was the poorest audience of the series, I doubt if 65% filled.

The performers in this series are mainly graduate music students in their late 20s. The singing was always good, sometimes outstanding. They tend to be adequate in acting and there is very little dancing, either because of the size of the stage or maybe the performers aren't skilled in dancing. Although it holds together only during the summer, the company is a repertory company, so singers who are leads in one show are in supporting roles in other shows. There are, however, a few exceptions, usually the ones with the best voices, who only performed lead roles.

The sets and production are imaginative, appropriate and first quality. Although I disagreed at times with the period costumes that were used for some of the shows, the costumes were also professional and slick. As is getting to be the case on Broadway, many shows got an automatic standing ovations, deserved or not, but at least  the  curtain calls were kept short.

The next morning I set off for Akron, about 35 miles from Wooster. 5/6ths of the way was the wide quiet roads I had gotten used to but the last few miles looked like I-95 to Richmond or Baltimore, crowded and hectic and pressured.

The city is fairly large, around 210,000 people but dropping in population, and used to be famous for rubber, chemicals, tires, blimps, dirigibles. The downtown section runs about 12 -15 blocks of main street and has several impressive 20 story buildings in 1920s art deco style. Here too there's obviously been enormous public infrastructure development: parking garages, special sidewalks, bus stop shelters, sport stadium, lighting, etc.

There were people everywhere but they gave the impression of lining up or gathering for health or other aid from county and state aid offices that seemed to be everywhere. It looked like there was no real economic life downtown. It was very depressing.

I thought maybe I had missed something and drove a second time through and around downtown. Maybe there's a second real downtown that I missed but what I saw was very off putting. I saw no reason / stores / cafes to get out of the car for and left the city. Maybe the economic life has moved to a different part of he city that I missed.

Not just in Akron but all throughout the area, [relatively close to Cleveland], I kept seeing signs and bumper sticker for the Pittsburgh Pirates, not for the Cleveland Indians.

I went back to Wooster via a detour through Masillon [about 32,000 people]  which was the most rural of the cities I saw. The downtown consists of one very wide street [Route US 30], basically the Lincoln highway, and was for all practical purposes dead of pedestrian life. A block off the main street was Liebermann's Bakery ["Established in 1880 and in the 5th generation of the same family"] The baking style was closer to that of Jersey City than what you find in DC but still wasn't the same; I got a coconut bun and a cherry bun. I had lunch at Smiley's Italian Ristorante on the main street, an [Arab] pizzeria and restaurant. I didn't have much of an appetite and didn't want a heavy meal. I got a cup of very good Italian Wedding soup and a not very good grilled ham and cheese sandwich.

Just before I got back to Wooster I passed by the Smuckers Center which has advertising signs all over the area. I expected it to be an outlet house for Smuckers jams and jellies at reduced prices. Instead it was a touristy T-shirt and pot pourri store. Very disappointing.

Washed and changed clothes and went to the matinee of The Music Man, the only show that was sold out and which even had standing room.

All the shows were in the Friedlander Theater on the Wooster College campus. The theater holds about 400 on one level; the decorations aren't ornate or traditional but the atmosphere of the house is warm. There are good acoustics [no miking for these performances] and I was sitting at many different locations throughout the theater from front to back from left to right. If I go back though, I'd try to get seats around Row G, since back in the last three rows you can't see the expressions on the singers' faces. Very often, though, the auditorium on verge of being too warm.

The orchestra pit rises for playing the overtures and then descends for the actual performance [except the harp which is always on the theater level]. [When the pit is up the musicians - around 20-25  in number - are in formal dress; but when you look down into the pit after it's descended, they strip down to white shirts].

This time when the orchestra rose up on the elevator to play the overture ... they didn't play the Music Man  overture you know from the play or from the movie . The orchestra is approximately the same size as a Broadway orchestra but the sound/arrangement in this production was completely different. I don't know enough about music to describe the difference; perhaps the instruments they were using.

The show was so well done I'm not going to comment on all the good points [chorus singing, individual singing, the star playing Harald Hill, the costumes, the orchestra] because there were so many of them . A few negatives that stuck out were the weak mayor, having two bourgeois Chinese children in 1912 Iowa, and a lot of poor diction [which when I read the reviews after the seeing the show, I learned that a most of the critics had noted] that made the English difficult to follow.

As I was enjoying the show, a few thoughts passed through my mind. A Brazilian-American friend of mine, Tom D, had commented once that when the Music Man movie opened in Brazil, nobody could understand what it was about because it was from such a different culture, and the movie was a flop. I was reminded of his comment in the library scene where Harald threatens Marian the Librarian with making noise by dropping a bag of marbles. It struck me that other nationalities, German, French, Italian, seeing the scene would miss all the allusions to quiet libraries, extreme shushing, and chaste librarians that Americans are completely familiar with. They could read up on those traits, but when they saw the show they would experience them only second hand, not from the amerikanischem Volksgeist.

Another thought was that when the show opened in 1957 it was only 45 years removed from the period it was set in; the 1957 audience included people who had buckled their knickerbockers BELOW the knee and who actually had used sen-sen to cover up the smell of their cigarettes. But now its 50 years since the show opened and a lot of the things [tailor made cigarettes, snooker, passenger trains] seem like ancient history. The last thought was that many of the songs from the show [76 Trombones, Til There Was You, Marian the Librarian, My White Knight] were on the hit parade and played over and over on pop radio; that never happens now with music from Broadway musicals.

I didn't have much of an appetite and it was hot so instead of going to a restaurant between shows, I bought a frozen dinner and heated it up in the hotel room's microwave oven and rested awhile.

The evening show was Sigmund Romberg's the New Moon from 1928 . As do many American operettas from the period [Naughty Marietta, Desert Song, Knickerbocker Holiday], it has the theme of democratic revolt of the masses against a decayed aristocracy. The New Mooon's specific theme is setting up a utopia on an island in the Caribbean and building the perfect society.

Great orchestra and chorus, good to great soloists. "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise" was sung beautifully by an Irish tenor [who as many of the male singers was not obese but noticeably overweight as was the case with many of the male principals -- but not with the females] and the main female lead, Marianne, was very good. The main male lead acted very well but sang with an overly operatic style that jarred with everyone else's style; his voice was fine but it was in the wrong production.

Several of the songs besides are also still well known today: Marianne [I Want to Love you], Stouthearted Men. Click this link to hear a medley but im the style of pop music from the 1920s, not operetta style - it might take about 30 seconds to load. [I also noticed at this performance that the line in Stouthearted Men really is: "You, you who have dreams, if you act, they will come true" which I had always heard as "You, you who have dreams, if you ask, they will come true" which is 180 degrees different in meaning.]   The refrain of another one of the songs that's still known today "One Kiss [One Man to Save It For]"  begins: "In this year 1792, our conventions are all quite askew". But the plot says its taking place before the French Revolution [1789].

There were other anachronisms [the French sailors in 1792 were wearing the blue and white striped uniforms and caps with red pom poms which was the uniform in the 20th century]; but the most extreme anachronisms [ a wolf call when seeing a pretty girl, 1920s "hot jazz"  music] were probably in the original 1927 show as interpolations for the comedians of the day, since Broadway shows then were much more loosely structured than after WW2 and there was a lot of room for star comedians and novelty acts to interpolate their own material.

The show was good but was another three hour one and I was exhausted by the end.

I was especially looking forward to Friday, the final day, which had a special gala performance, Operetta Concentrate withy "nine operettas in 90 minutes" . But the series of power failures in Wooster during the week's heat wave had cancelled a lot of the rehearsals and that caused the gala to be cancelled.

Because the gala performance wasn't being performed, I decided to leave Wooster a day early and drive back by a somewhat roundabout way through northern Pennsylvania to State College where Penn State is [and where I was thinking of renting an apartment for 2 months a year after I retire to get away from the Washington heat]. In addition, one of my cousins was going to be in Oil City Pennsylvania, where her daughter is beginning college and since it was only a 25 mile detour from the road I'd be on, I thought we might meet for lunch . But the scheduling didn't work out.

The first 25 miles out of Wooster was just as the other drives had been: empty 4 lane highways with wide medians and no need to pay much attention or do calculations on cars entering the highway or trucks starting to go up a hill. But after I passed Akron, the roads changed to the heavily trafficked and ugly and hectic highways around Washington. But by Youngstown and the Pennsylvania border the highway got relatively empty and relatively quiet.

The variety of radio stations in northeastern Ohio is far wider than in the DC area; at least two big band stations, one polka station and one all kinds of music except rock station.

Interstate 80 runs  through the Allegheny Mountains - I think the highest points are near Clarion - at a relatively high elevation but not with the peaks and valleys you have down in Maryland and West Virginia. The exits are relatively far apart and not all of them have gas stations. For some reason, I suspect I was unusually tired on this trip, I overshot the State College exit completely and had to drive an extra 25 or 30 miles to get back to the exit.

The road from Interstate 80 to State College [maybe 15 miles??] was through a wide valley to the town. The first thing I heard on the local radio driving in was a commercial from a lawyer for springing PSU students from DWI charges.

After checking in and showering at the Hilton Garden Inn  at the edge of the town and where by accident I wound up with a suite instead of a room, I drove downtown.

The town has 38,000 people [and then another 35,000  students for nine months a year]. The business section is about 15 blocks long; the first 5 blocks are lined with [student] condominiums; the rest are filled with stores. The street is one way and the reverse street is also store-lined its entire length but the stores aren't as closely packed in. Opposite the commercial strip on the main street  is the campus of the University. The street is tree-lined, even on the commercial side, and the whole impression is far nicer than other college town commercial streets, such as Maryland's College Park or Virginia's Charlottesville.

I began driving around the residential sections and then stopped at a real estate agency where I was told it was highly unlikely to be able to get a three month rental during the summers.

On the advice of the realtor I had supper at the Allen Street Grill  on the main street. On the second floor you look out through glass walls and trees onto the Penn State campus which must be several miles square [it began as an agricultural college]. The food [bean soup, chicken with mushrooms and vegetables] was good but not up to the standard of the setting.

In the rental Chevrolet  Maxx, a combination of a 4 door sedan and a station wagon with a small V6  engine there was a total  of  1,229 miles at 25.5 mpg with gas ranging from $2.99 in Virginia to $2.73 in Ohio.
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Updated 8/18/2006