From Cleveland to Toledo the roads are very like those of France, they have wonderful foundations but badly worn surfaces. Much the best hotel in Toledo is the Secor, and the restaurant, which made no attempt at imitating French cooking, was good.
There was a most beautiful art museum in Toledo, a small building pure Greek in style and set like a jewel against pyramidal evergreens. It is quite the loveliest thing we have seen.
Because of Ohio’s speed restrictions, twenty miles fastest going and eight for villages, etc., one must either spend days in crawling across the state or break the law. As is usually the case with unreasonable laws, few keep them, or else the motoring Ohioans interpret their speed laws rather liberally. Of the hundreds of motors we met in Ohio, especially near Cleveland, which is one of the biggest automobile centers in the country, scarcely one, even within the city limits, was going less than twenty-five miles an hour.
However, as it is not courteous for the stranger to dash lawlessly through at faster than the twelve-mile average prescribed by law, the run from Toledo to South Bend, a distance of one hundred and sixty-two miles, will take from twelve to fourteen hours. The road is good, most of it, but sandwiched between occasional poor stretches.
We lunched at Bryan at the Christman Hotel. It was here that I heard a new retort courteous. I had dropped a veil; a youth picked it up. I said, “Thank you.” He replied politely, “Yours truly!”
The Oliver, “Indiana’s finest hotel,” at South Bend is good, clean, well run, with a Louis Quatorze dining-room in black and white. The black and white craze is raging here quite as much as in New York.
CHAPTER V
LUGGAGE AND OTHER LUXURIES
Never in the world did people have so much luggage with nowhere to put it and nothing in it when it is put! Each black piece is bursting! Yet everything we have with us is the wrong thing and just so much to take care of without any compensating comfort. We have gradually eliminated everything we could until now we have just enough for three hallboys on our arrival and three porters on our departure to stagger under. Then too, although possibly all right for a man and wife, sharing the motor trunk with a son is an inconvenience unimagined! If the trunk is put in my room, he finds himself somewhere on another floor or at the end of an interminable corridor unable to get his pajamas without entirely redressing. If the trunk is in his room I have to hunt for him, get his key, and bring the trays to my room. Packing one trunk in two rooms at once is even more difficult. Consequently, he has in desperation bought a “suitcase.” It is orange-colored, made of paper, I think, and it also makes one more lump of baggage to be carried up and down and packed on top of our traveling companion.