Anniversary trip to Cleveland, part 1 of 2

I had some hotel points that are going to expire, so I asked Dear Husband whether he wanted to use them for a night out here in town, but he asked what the point of that was when we could go to Cleveland to see the Baltimore Orioles play, so with that we rearranged our work weeks to take an impromptu overnight trip to celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary.

I found us a hotel in the University Circle area so we could park our car and walk or use public transit. After debating a variety of itineraries, we decided to reprise our honeymoon in Denver (and many other anniversary trips on this blog): botanical garden, art museum, and baseball game.

DH asked if I was taking him to "the Garden Center" he used to visit when he was a student at the Cleveland Institute of Music 35 years ago, but my research had uncovered no such place. The Cleveland Botanical Garden, however, consists of a large glasshouse split into two different biomes and 9 acres of outdoor gardens.

An antechamber currently houses colorful paintings by Robert J. Putka and ceramic flowers by Kristin Kowalski. Other parts of the building had yet more botanical art of various kinds.

The first biome was the dry tropical forest of Madagascar. We learned some neat facts about baobab trees and saw this snoozing tortoise, but it was not very interesting compared to the Costa Rican cloud rainforest beyond the double doors.

The highlight of the rain forest was undoubtedly the butterflies, none of which I managed to photograph. Big blue morphos, three orange Julias chasing each other, learning to tell blue and whing longwings from postman butterflies. Of course there were orchids and waterfalls and poison dart frogs, and funny little birds.

Then it was out into the heat to explore the outdoor gardens. They don't have a map right now, because they are renovating some of them, but I think we managed to visit all the different themed sections, starting with the courtyard and herbal gardens, and then the children's section (partially under construction but decorated for the Olympics).

A "restorative garden" brought welcome shade, and then the woodlands garden has a wooden ramp and this treehouse with a look-out platform reachable by a metal ladder. Across a bridge, over a stream, and along the back path brought us to the small Japanese garden.

This is DH looking over the back wall at the Cleveland Institute of Music across the street. We figured out that the outdoor gardens were freely accessible until this wooden fence was built c. 1990, and it was called "the Garden Center" until the year after he graduated. Below you can see the colorful coverings on the now-aging divide, as well as the glasshouse from behind. We tried to visit CIM, but they've rebuilt large parts of it, and it's not open to the public during construction.

Click here for Part 2 of our anniversary trip.