Arriving in Akron around 7am, I was in no hurry to leave the Greyhound Station since my car rental reservation wasn't for another 3 hours.

Throwing my stuff down against a wall, I thought about trying to grab a few additional minutes of sweet sleep here on the floor, but that wasn't happening in the desolate station where I only saw strange characters instead of security.

As much as I want to see the top 10 cities of every state, Akron ranks even higher because it's in a state I like (Ohio), has a gritty reputation, and it should be good because it's surrounded by other great cities (Pittsburgh, Cleveland & Erie).

So I was trying to breathe this all in, but I also awfully bleary-eyed and foggy. I had that lack of sleep discomfort as I walked up King James Way, heading past Akron's minor league ballpark, Canal Park.

With it being late October the sunrise was around 8 a.m., with the darkness lingering even further on this rainy morning. After snapping a few pictures, I wandered into another urban mall - what is this, the urban mall trip? - wasting a bunch of time walking down corridor after corridor looking for a washroom.

After heading back outside and exploring a couple of plazas between and around skyscrapers, I decided to tackle the half-mile walk out to the Akron Family Restaurant to eat up some time.

Akron's downtown didn't seem decimated as much as other Rust Belt cities, but there still aren't many breakfast options on a normal day, and even fewer on a Saturday. It looked like I had a grand total of 3 non-chain options which were reasonably within reach by foot or bus.

Just west of downtown was the Akron Family Restaurant, with a forgettable exterior, but it'd been around since 1986 and was awfully busy this morning. My first taste of chicken and waffles seemed good through the hunger I could muster while struggling to keep my eyes open, and the coffee also fought valiantly in that battle against slumber.

Part of me wanted to keep drinking coffee until my car rental across the street was ready, but I was just too excited to see more of Akron. One of my favourite things in the world is exploring mid-sized American cities, so I needed to get back out there.

The above picture is taken from Market Street, just to the west of downtown as I made my way back. The thing in the foreground is just the ribs for a sign once advertising the "Apex Professional Center" back in 2011, but the sign has since advertised weed, lost all its signs, and now advertises that the entire "Cadillac Hill" parcel that's for sale.

I should have changed my route more on the return walk through downtown, because I felt like I ended up in the same area and saw a lot of the same or similar boring financial buildings. In hindsight, I was only a half block from the county courthouse and a block from the grain silos they renovated into student residences, but on the ground it was raining and I was getting itchy feet to get going in my rental.

After walking another mile back out to Budget, I really didn't have time for the customer in front of me who was a disorganized mess that couldn't manage an ant farm. Thankfully two people were working and I was called over to the other terminal & left within minutes with my rental and a smile.

All the way to the far reaches of southeast Akron - out by the airport, the Goodyear blimp hangar, and Akron's famed skatepark - stands the Rubber Bowl, an abandoned college football stadium where I was headed to next.

I pulled off the parkway onto a little nub of a driveway while traffic roared by. It seemed like the type of road where no one walks and they'd pick you out in no time, as someone with the nefarious intentions of sneaking into their abandoned stadium.

Looking at my Garmin GPS car unit I brought along, there looked to be a public street on the backside of the stadium, between it and the airport. Driving back, I turned at a medical supply business and found a feeder road which brought me past the skatepark - damn not having my bike! - and then up near the Rubber Bowl.

The only thing was that there were a lot of cars and commotion up ahead.

A soap box derby?! Well, this sure was a new means of exploration failure!

I really should have done more satellite research before coming here, but the Rubber Bowl looked so beat in pictures that I didn't think it could possibly be complicated. As it turns out, it shares a boundary with a popular soap box derby track.

There was an entirely missing section of fence and I struggled with weighing whether anyone would even care if I just wandered onto the astroturf.

These were people with big trucks, fancy cars, and enough money to involve their kids in high-level soap box derbying though. They struck me as men who wouldn't want someone setting a bad example by trespassing in front of their lily-white children.

I thought better of pushing my luck.

The Rubber Bowl is a historic football field built in 1940 and abandoned in 2008 after the University of Akron Zips moved to their new InfoCision Stadium. They wanted a stadium that wasn't 10km (6mi) away from their campus and they'd let the Rubber Bowl become rundown by that point.

A local marketing company bought the stadium for $38,000 in January 2013, planning to attract a USFL football team and call them the Akron Fire. The USFL eventually abandoned their Akron plans & the marketing company then thought they'd improve the stadium by building a dome over it, but their first concert - a hip hop event called LOUD-fest - was moved to another location due to the condition of the Rubber Bowl.

By April of 2017, Summit County foreclosed on the stadium but allowed the marketing company to continue with their plans, but by August of 2017, the company gave up the deed and the stadium was condemned. Portions closer to the soap box derby track were demolished in 2018, while the seats built into the hillside remained as of 2020, due to complications related to the proximity of the stadium to George Washington Blvd.

I really should have got here years earlier, as you can see in this photo from Mitchell Aldridge in 2015. Every Christmas I thought about how I could include Akron in my plans, but just never got around to it. It's the old lesson of getting things done learned once again.

After the Rubber Bowl, it was time to make haste towards the next part of the trip - checking out formerly prominent towns along the Ohio River via their county seats. Seeing as the Ohio River makes up the southern boundary of the state of Ohio, I now had some driving ahead of me.

Merging onto the new-to-me I-77, I raced past places I want to see one day like Canton & New Philadelphia, as it was already getting later in the day and I still had plenty of stops to squeeze in.

Three hours later, after driving through the wooded hills of eastern Ohio, I arrived in Pomeroy, my first stop of the day. The Ohio River wasn't all that impressive seeing as I'm used to the Detroit River, but it fit the mood as it lazily flowed high up on its banks, while I explored what I pictured was going to be a sleepy, slow-moving town.

Pomeroy is situated in Meigs County, which was created in 1819 from pieces of Gallia, Washington & Athens counties. Middleport was the county seat for the first four years, before the seat was then moved to Chester, where the oldest Ohio County Courthouse building still stands.

(And because I didn't know this at the time, I can't check off Meigs County because I didn't go to Chester.)

With Chester declining & Pomeroy coming into prominence, they moved the county seat here in the 1840s and built the Meigs County Courthouse in 1845 - making it the oldest continually used courthouse in Ohio. It's so old that it held 227 Confederate soldiers during the Civil War after they were captured as part of Morgan's Raid, where the Confederacy sent soldiers through Indiana and Ohio to try and scare the home front into demanding their own soldiers return home from the front lines.

It was also raining in Pomeroy and it was a struggle just to time the traffic right to get out into the middle of the road while not getting my camera completely wet.

As I stood under an overhang, I could appreciate how Pomeroy had one of those classic courthouse scenes, where the building is situated prominently and the front road dips down with old storefronts lining the side.

Pomeroy was built by coal and bromine, and with this being coal country, the city's population skyrocketed 300% from 1840 to 1850, and another 300% from 1850 to 1860.

From that high population of 6,480 people in 1860, the coal reserves diminished and bromide prices plummeted after better methods of extracting bromine came out of Michigan and DOW Chemical.

Pomeroy has been in steady decline since, with a population of 1,852 in 2010. Meigs County ranks in the bottom half dozen of Ohio counties with 21% of the population living below the poverty line, and here in Pomeroy that number is 31%. The median household income is a measly $19,971.

Part of driving down here was that I haven't seen much of the weathered coal country of America set into these hills of Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. Mother Nature was sure doing her part setting the scene too, as the heavy rain and low ceiling made Pomeroy look even more forgotten.

It's actually this lack of further good fortune that has made a huge swath of downtown into a historic district, since there was never any call to tear down the old Italianate structures and replace them with brick, concrete or stucco rectangles.

Driving around some houses and stores away from the Ohio River, I was surprised to spot a skatepark in a field between all the houses.

It's not overly my type of skatepark, but it's great that the kids here have something.

Lunch was at Taco Bell, where I was able to test something new I learned from chilicheese.org, that one quarter of the Taco Bells in the States actually still serve the long discontinued chili cheese burrito (sometimes known as a Chilito). Sure enough, here in Pomeroy, they even didn't bat an eye when I asked for a "uh, um, a chili cheese burrito, or a Chilito?"

Grabbing my takeout bag from the drive-thru, there they were: 2 chili cheese burritos. Just like back in Canada!

I made sure to mark the site as chili cheese friendly on chilicheese.org, helping out other lovers of the Chilito. Although, it now sadly seems like the webmaster has let the dream die & chilicheese.org has been down for about a month. I'm going to have to write him or her and see if I can get a copy of the database.

Also, for one of the first times ever, I was sad I went to Taco Bell. This is because I forgot Pomeroy was one of two remaining places in America that serve McDonald's Pizza. After hearing Donnie's go-to stories about McDonald's Pizza for years, I thought I missed my chance to finally have it - except Pomeroy and Spencer, WV apparently served up their last pizza on August 31st of 2017.

I needed to keep it moving. I merged onto the Ohio River Scenic Byway and didn't find it very exciting for the next half-hour, especially as it went around Middleport instead of through it.

This boredom wasn't the case when I finally pulled into the county seat of Gallia County in Gallipolis. Their courthouse may be a snoozefest on account of a 1981 fire that destroyed their 1879 Italiante courthouse with clock tower cupola, but I was surprised by the surrounding town.

Where I was expecting down on their luck Appalachian cities this afternoon, especially after all the articles I read about upcoming Portsmouth, I was surprised to find brick-lined walkways, unique architecture and well maintained historic structures here in Gallipolis.

Gallipolis's history is unlike its neighbours though. It was settled by middle class French fleeing the French Revolution, who were conned by the Scioto Land Company into buying land parcels and then arriving to find the deeds worthless since the Scioto Land Company didn't actually purchase any of the land.

Many of the French headed back to Alexandria Virginia, but the federal government also created the French Grant, purchasing a marshy land parcel on the Ohio River and telling the French it was available for them to settle.

Laying out a grid system, the displaced and previously swindled French would name the new village Gallipolis.

Many of the old French buildings remain and a large swath of downtown is now within a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. From the old post office, to the Colony Theater, to these shotgun shacks across from the courthouse where the application describes the right one as "steamboat gothic."

(This used to be known as "Lawyers Row" because these three houses were home to lawyers offices. The steamboat gothic one is now home to a photography business.)

At one of the main crossroads of town, I was sad to see what I feared was a demolition that would not only take down an exemplary building, but also leave a gap in the Gallipolis streetscape across from their central square.

This building was the original home of the Ohio Valley Bank and they actually recently purchased the building to renovate it and move back in. Sadly they also purchased and demolished the adjoining buildings both to the north and the west, but at least the new builds are going to have a rooftop deck overlooking the square, other Gallipolis buildings, and the Ohio River? That should be decent.

(And don't think the historic district prevented any further demolition. I was taking photographs from where the Park Central Hotel once stood, a hotel touted as the finest along the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. It would eventually be demolished by neglect, with the back sloughing off in 2009 and an emergency demolition being approved soon after.)

As I walked around in the light rain appreciating this great town, I couldn't help but think about how I wished I made my motel reservation here for tonight. Then again, there was still a great distance to make it to Cincinnati by tomorrow morning, so I guess Gallipolis will have to wait for some future trip with Isy (it seemed like a place she would like).

Continue to Part 4...