This is my motel from last night.

It was rather out of my budget but

• it was here
• it was open
• it had a room
• it was nice and comfortable
• it had a good situation right on the waterfront

and you can’t say fairer than that.

And remember years ago when we saw that lorry driving up the railway line and I thought that it was an optical illusion?

So here’s another one and you can see by the fittings underneath it that it’s not an optical illusuon and these lorries do actually exist. I had a chat to the workers – apparently they are rail welders and check the rails for cracks, which they weld up if they can, or signal for replacement if they can’t.

Lake Erie has a reputation of being the filthiest lake in the world, with all kind of industrial discharges into the water.

But that’s not all that is discharged into the lake, judging by this sign. And to think that there’s a beach resort just a couple of miles up the road. Not that the USA would care too much about that, I suppose.

This is the Vermillion Inland Waterways Museum, or some such name. It goes without saying that it was closed when Casey, Strawberry Moose and I visited. But then again, I wasn’t expecting anything else.

And Vermillion is the birthplace of Lester Allen Pelton who invested the “Pelton Wheel” type of water turbine. I had a quick look around but couldn’t see anything in the town to commemorate him.

The Vermillion Museum is situated in Ferry Road, which tells you such a lot about the history of the town, and it its fortune has always been based around the water.

Today, it’s famous for its marina and attracts thousands of water-borne tourists each year (who I bet haven’t read the notice in the harbour down the road at Sandusky). Nevertheless, it’s a nice pretty little place even in this kind of weather.

That’s Cleveland, Ohio, just down there. I was planning to park up and go for a little wander around but just after this photo I was engulfed in this most astonishing rainstorm the like of which I haven’t seen in ages.

That put paid to all of my plans – I wasn’t going to set foot out of the car in this kind of weather. I stayed put and carried on driving.

But one thing astonished me about Cleveland is that not only did it have buses, it had dedicated bus lanes too. Imagine that in the USA!

And that wasn’t all that surprised me about Cleveland either. Here on the corner of Lakeside Boulevard and East 315th Street is an Aldi. I had to go in for a look around.

And my conclusion? Well, the only resemblance that it bears to the European version of the shop is the sign on the shop front. For a start, the Bargain Section is total rubbish, something that would never be the case in a European Aldi, and no-one from Europe would ever recognise any of the products on sale here. The “German” potato salad bore no resemblance to any potato salad that any German Aldi has ever sold.

Oooohhhhh! Now take a look at this.

I’ve been musing to myself as I’ve been driving through Ohio that I haven’t seen any old cars around and that’s been something of a surprise. But here on the way out of Cleveland near Madison, I’ve encountered an old Rover SD1.

You don’t see any of these in the UK these days – they’ve all been broken for the V8 engines that people have fitted into Land Rovers, so no-one was more surprised than me to see this one looking comparatively fit and healthy in the USA. However did it manage to come here?

This is Ashtabula – one of the very few working harbours remaining on Lake Erie these days. All kinds of stuff – coal, gravel are shipped from here and it has the reputation of being one of the most polluted places on the lake – and that’s saying something!

Bob Dylan sang about it, Jack Kerouac wrote about it, it’s also been the site of one of the USA’s worst railway disasters, and the rail ferry that sailed from here across the lake to Canada sank just off-shore following a collision. It was 52 years old at the time.

From here, I cross into Pennsylvania having missed out on the fate that befell Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer (and, incidentally, Joseph Lewis, John Cleary, Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, Dean Kahler, Douglas Wrentmore, James Russell, Robert Stamps and Donald MacKenzie, the suffering of whom is largely ignored by the media).

In fact, you can tell that we are elsewhere other than Ohio by the amount of rubbish and old cars lying around. And I don’t mean that pejoratively either, because I’d been making little notes to myself all along today’s journey about how unusually (and unacceptably) tidy everywhere in Ohio is – it’s no place for me.

I’m running on fumes looking for a petrol station (which I eventually find, manned … "personned" – ed … by someone from Swindon, Wiltshire) and looking for a motel, as the night is upon me. Eventually, the town of Erie comes up with something and so I settle myself in.

It’s heaving down with rain and I’m not going out.