Round Two: The time I missed a bus and ended up in Buffalo

I can hear the words as plainly now as I did the day my friend, Tom, said them to me over the phone in April 1994:

“Only an idiot can miss it.”

The “it” in question was a hotel in Richfield where my new girlfriend (and future wife) Kim and I were to meet Tom and his future wife. The point of the meeting: to be at the hotel parking lot in time to take a fan bus to downtown Cleveland, where the bus would drop us off to see a game at shiny new Jacobs Field, then only a few weeks old.

In those early days, city and team officials discouraged fans from driving to games at the new ballpark because parking space was at a premium (a strong argument could be made that it hasn’t gotten much better in the three decades since). Public transportation was the best way to go, we were told, so that’s the way we went that Sunday afternoon 29 years ago.

At least, that was the plan.

Since the hotel was in Richfield and Kim and I lived in Cuyahoga Falls, making it in time to catch the bus wasn’t an issue. I just needed to know exactly where the hotel was located.

Tom, a graduate of Revere High School who knew his way around Richfield, was in the process of giving me precise directions to the hotel during our phone conversation a few days before the game (these were the days before smartphones and GPS). I busily scrawled the directions on a piece of paper (yes, this was 1994, not 1894), read them back to him, and he confirmed that I had indeed written them down correctly.

“Sounds easy enough,” I said.

“Yes,” Tom replied. “Only an idiot could miss it.”

I missed it.

And ended up in Buffalo, New York — in a roundabout sort of way.

The day dawned bright and beautiful on the morning in question — a great day for baseball, as legendary Cleveland sportscaster Joe Tait would say. We left in plenty of time to catch the bus, traffic was light, it was a true Chamber of Commerce Sunday morning. It was going to be our first time at the new ballpark, so anticipation was high as we reached Richfield …

… And promptly sailed right past our exit. Only we didn’t realize it right away; it wasn’t until it became obvious that something was wrong that we knew we had to turn around (that’s how you navigated in those days — instinct took the place of technology).

But now we had two problems: Finding an exit on the expressway so we could turn around as quickly as possible, and finding the Richfield hotel that, at this point, was several miles in the other direction — somewhere.

Make that, three problems: We were now running woefully short on time for the bus pickup.

And since these were basically pre-cell phone days, simply calling Tom and having him guide us back to the hotel that “only an idiot” could miss wasn’t an option. We were on our own.

By the time we finally found the hotel and pulled into the parking lot, the bus was long gone. With no way to contact Tom at this point, going to the baseball game was now off the table (we hadn’t bothered to make emergency plans in the event we missed connections because, once again, only an idiot could miss it).

Kim and I sat in the car, staring at the nearly empty hotel parking lot wondering what to do next. It was such a beautiful early-spring day and it was only late morning … it seemed a shame to waste it. But what should we do?

“Let’s go somewhere,” Kim finally said.

“Where?” I answered.

“I don’t know, somewhere we haven’t been. Somewhere different,” she said.

At that point in our young lives, that was most places. “Around here?” I asked.

Then, after several seconds of silence, Kim said: “How far is Buffalo from here?”

“Buffalo?! About three or four hours. Why?” I responded.

“OK,” she said, “let’s go there!”

Kim was putting a whole lot of faith in the guy who couldn’t find a hotel 20 minutes from his front door being able to find his way to a city that was three hours and two states away, but hey, we had all day. I felt terrible about ruining our first trip to Jacobs Field, so it was worth a try.

We didn’t know anyone in Buffalo, there wasn’t anything specific we wanted to see there other than … Buffalo.

So off we went, hugging the Lake Erie shoreline up I-90 into Pennsylvania and New York into Buffalo, blasting tunes by the likes of Counting Crows, Gin Blossoms, Crash Test Dummies and Alice In Chains on the radio, basking in a carefree trip to Upstate New York while our friends sat in their seats at Jacobs Field surely baffled as to what had happened to us — and never being able to guess in a million years.

While they were at Jacobs Field, I was running straight down the middle of the field from end zone to end zone at the Buffalo Bills’ Rich Stadium in Orchard Park, New York — Kim having encouraged me to slide underneath a fence to sneak into the vacant stadium and take pictures.

While they were at Jacobs Field, we were eating at Jim Kelly’s Sport City Grill in downtown Buffalo and admiring all the cool football memorabilia curated by the then-Bills quarterback.

While they were at Jacobs Field, we were kicking around Buffalo and taking advantage of the strange set of circumstances that led us there — and wondering where the road would lead next.

Night had fallen by the time we decided to head back home. Work awaited the next morning, and I projected that we would be pulling into Cuyahoga Falls sometime between 12:30 and 1 a.m. The antennas high atop the buildings of downtown Buffalo blinked red in the darkness as I pointed the car westward toward Ohio.

And forward to the rest of our lives. Because what started out as an off-the-cuff day trip resulting from my inability to follow simple directions in April 1994 quickly became a hobby and passion to last the rest of my life. Our travels across North America in the nearly 30 years since that day have taken us to such iconic sports venues as the Rose Bowl, Yankee Stadium (old and new), Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, SkyDome (now the Rogers Centre), the old Orange Bowl stadium, Notre Dame Stadium, Dodger Stadium, The Forum of Inglewood, the Superdome and Aloha Stadium, among hundreds of others.

There’s a good chance none of that would have happened if I had found the hotel in Richfield that day. We would have gotten on that bus, gone to Cleveland, watched the game at Jacobs Field, gone home, and gone on with our originally planned lives the following day. Just another springtime weekend in Northeast Ohio.

But as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said: “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”

And I would have been an idiot to miss it.

[Next week: Tales from the Open Road: A Sports Odyssey Across America]