Less than an hour outside the city are several small towns and sights well worth exploring. VERMILION , beyond the western suburbs of Cleveland, is also known as Harbor Town because of its attractive lakeside area, which has thrived since 1837. Today it's a quaint old hamlet lined with clapboard houses, cedar trees and tidy gardens. Old-style galleries and shops hug the small downtown, a stone's throw from the boat rides, seafood restaurants and fishing boats on the dockside. Through models, pictures and artifacts, the Inland Seas Maritime Museum , 480 Main St (daily 10am-5pm; $5), does a worthy job of exploring shipping on the Great Lakes from the late seventeenth century to the wreckage of the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter almost 300 years later. Vermilion's visitor center is at 5741 Liberty Ave (Tues-Thurs 10am-4:30pm; tel 440/967-4262). The best place to stay in town is the comfortable Motel Plaza , 4645 Liberty Ave (tel 440/967-3191; $50-75). Just east in the industrial port town of LORAIN , the Spitzer Plaza Hotel , 301 Broadway Ave (tel 440/246-5767 or 1-800/446-7452; $100-130), offers big rooms and good value.

Some twenty miles southeast of Vermilion, the famously liberal college town of OBERLIN clusters around the green acres of Tappan Square. Founded in 1834, Oberlin College , on the square's north and east sides, was America's first co-ed university and one of the first to enroll black students. From the start, it played a pivotal role in facilitating the movement of black slaves from the Deep South to Canada on the Underground Railroad. A sculpture of railroad tracks emerging from the earth, opposite the Conservatory of Music at South Professor Street, is one of several such commemorative sights detailed in a fascinating walking tour leaflet available from the Chamber of Commerce , 20 E College St (Mon-Fri 8.30am-5pm; tel 440/774-6262, ). Also of interest is the Allen Memorial Art Museum , 87 Main St (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; free; ). Recognized as one of the best college museums in the US, it holds more than 14,000 objects, from ancient Egyptian icons to Japanese woodblock prints and a fine array of contemporary art.

There are plenty of good places to stay in town. The pleasant Oberlin Inn motel is at 7 N Main St (tel 440/775-1111, ; $130-160). The Ivy Tree Inn & Garden , 195 S Professor St (tel 440/774-4510; $75-100), offers a well-tended garden in a comfortable B&B atmosphere. Oberlin also boasts half a dozen hip coffee houses and bars, with good organic food dished up at the Two Trees Café in the Co-op Bookstore, 37 W College St (tel 440/774-3741).

Twenty miles south of Cleveland off US-77, the village of PENINSULA is nestled in the heart of the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area , where the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath's hiking and biking trail follows the meandering Cuyahoga River for twenty miles. A few miles south of town off Riverview Road, the sprawling Hale Farm and Village (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $9) brings to life the fictional 1848 Ohio township of Wheatfield, complete with good-natured role-playing townsfolk and artisans who demonstrate skills like brick-making and glass-blowing.

The best place to stay in the area is at HI-Stanford House (tel 330/467-8711; up to $35), 6093 Stanford Rd, a hostel in a lovely old farmhouse. Bike rental is easy to come by at Century Cycles, 1621 Main St ($5 first hour, $4 second hour, $3 each additional hour); the Chamber of Commerce , 1663 Main St, is just down the block.

A few miles farther south in AKRON (home of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co), visitors can tour Goodyear co-founder F.A. Seiberling's palatial Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens , 714 N Portage Path (Jan-March Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 1-4pm; April-Dec daily 10am-4.30pm; $8, gardens only $4), a magnificent 65-room Tudor Revival country house finished in 1915, with secret passageways, hand-carved wood paneling and an indoor swimming pool.

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