Southwest Ohio

Rosie Red, 50 years old and looking better than ever!

It was an off-day for Reds relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman. Although he picked up the save, only one of the 12 pitches he threw against the Brewers clocked at 100 mph-plus. Chapman averaged more than 100 mph per pitch this year, the first pitcher ever to do that.

The phone call that brought an abrupt end to our tour of Ohio seemed like a literal "bolt out of the blue".
 
Thursday Sept. 25 was an absolutely spectacular, blue-sky, Chamber-of-Commerce-day. At a "get-away" game with a 12:35 start we watched the Reds beat the Brewers, then spent nearly two hours looking around in the extensive Reds Hall-of-Fame adjacent to the ballpark. We were savoring a good meal and taking the final sips of our beers while enjoying the spectacular view of the Ohio River and northern Kentucky from the deck of the Christian Moerlein Brewpub when the phone call came telling us that our friend John Donahue had died. 

We left for home the next day and arrived on Sunday, in plenty of time for the memorial service on Monday.
 

We had planned to spend only three or four more days in Ohio; moving to a state park near Dayton, maybe taking in a high school football game, checking out the Wright Brothers historic site, visiting the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB and helping Dayton celebrate Octoberfest (Ohio is gaga for Octoberfests).

But that was not to be. Another time perhaps.

The trip home was uneventful, which in this case translates to "just about perfect"; good roads, clear skies, clean and efficient campgrounds. We rarely go that far, that fast when pulling the trailer but it all went exceptionally well.

There was no time for sightseeing, of course, but I did take a couple of early morning photos at one of our campgounds; in my Mom's old stomping grounds, the flat Mississippi river bottomlands in the bootheel of Missouri (those are cotton plants in the second photo).

 

The remainder of this post was prepared prior to the phone call.

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The decision to “really get to know” Ohio was driven mostly by our summer schedule but also by the expectation that it would be a good time, weather-wise, to be here. That has proven to be a good assumption.

There have been a few warm days and we have used the AC in the trailer a few times. But lately we’ve been running the heater at night. The morning after fall officially turned to spring the temperature dropped to 39 and the leaves are rapidly turning.

Fall when it is supposed to be fall. What a concept.

After settling into yet another state park on the suburban fringe of a large Ohio city (SOP for this trip) we kicked off our stay in southwest Ohio by attending the “Zinzinnati” Octoberfest in the heart of downtown Cincinnati – supposedly the second-largest Octoberfest in the world (behind the real thing in Munich).

I can’t vouch for that claim but I can say that it was a big party; with five blocks of the downtown closed off and packed with people on a nice Saturday afternoon. It was fun. The event is well-organized, people were well-behaved and the food and beer were good and fairly-priced. One thing we noticed though is that the cowboys here in Ohio look a lot different than the cowboys in Texas.

Another claim the organizers make is that they have the world’s largest Chicken Dance. Again, I’m not vouching for it but, as the photos show, there were a lot of participants (including someone you may know).

That was Saturday Sept. 20. On Sunday we headed east from our park to the birthplace and boyhood home of yet another Ohio president, Ulysses Grant. En route we snagged our 11^th Ohio Bicentennial Barn and our 51^st Ohio County. It was a beautiful day and the route took us along the Ohio River. Betsy was blue at the Texans loss but we enjoyed our early evening jogs/bike rides on some of the trails in the huge park.

Ulysses Grant grew up in this house in Georgetown before leaving for West Point

Grant was born in this house in Point Pleasant, about a quarter-mile from the Ohio River

This is our 11th Bicentennial barn sighting, in Clermont County

On Monday we finished off the Ohio presidents with stops at the birthplace and boyhood of home of William Howard Taft in Cincinnati and the tomb of William Henry Harrison and the birthplace of his grandson Benjamin Harrison in North Bend, which is essentially a suburb west of Cincinnati, overlooking the Ohio River in the extreme southwest corner of the state.

It took about 80 years for Ohio to get around to building this monument at the tomb of William Henry Harrison

Poor Ohio. They try hard to make something of the state’s connections to eight presidents but the cold, hard truth is that none of these presidents ranks in the top half of anyone’s list. More likely, all eight of them fall somewhere in the bottom third of most rankings by historians. Two died a few months after taking office and a third died after two years. Two others lost the popular election and gained the presidency only through the quirks of (and, in one case, the manipulation of) the Electoral College. Only two of the eight won a second term and only one completed it.

The memorials to these eight men are random, uneven and often quirky; but they’ve taken us off the beaten path, to little corners of Ohio where we might not otherwise have gone.

For lunch we tried "Cincinnati Chili", which is basically a bland meat sauce with hints of curry that would not qualify to be called chili in Texas; poured over spaghetti with cheese on top and beans, onion, etc. added to taste.

This weird concoction was edible, but I'd suggest Ohio stick to Octoberfest celebrations and leave the chili to Texas.

Tuesday was chamber-of-commerce weather and we headed back to downtown Cincinnati to visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. We had no particular expectation. We’d heard good things about it during the trip but we were not really prepared for it to be so extensive and substantial; nor for it to be housed in such a beautiful building with such incredible views on such a spectacular day.

Perhaps nowhere in the pre-Civil War U.S. was the dividing line between north and south more distinctly drawn than in this section of the Ohio River that separates Cincinnati and Covington, Ky. The panoramic photo was taken from a deck at the Freedom Museum.

The underground railroad was not, of course, an actual railroad. Rather it was a network of people that helped slaves escape from the southern states and pass through the northern states to reach Canada and freedom in the days when slavery was legal in all of the southern states and several of the northern states' and harboring runaway slaves was illegal nationwide.

As we anticipated, the museum addresses all this in some detail. But one of the things we did not expect was for the subject to be presented and explained in modern terms; i.e. human trafficking.

To make this point very effectively the museum shows a film which cuts back and forth from an actor portraying a runaway slave escaping via the underground railroad and a contemporary Cambodian man who was kidnapped and forced to work on a fishing boat and in a palm oil plantation, before he escaped with the help of a modern-day version of an “underground railroad” in southeast Asia.

In the area of the museum that deals specifically with American slavery I especially liked the level-headed, accurate treatment of the emancipation proclamation (who it freed, who it didn’t free and Lincoln’s motives for doing it); Lincoln’s views on civil rights (basically, by modern standards, he was a bigot and a racist), the importance of the 14^th amendment and other matters related to the Civil War that are often misrepresented and misunderstood.

We spent the entire afternoon at the museum then walked across the Ohio River to Kentucky on the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. The bridge was completed in 1866 and if it looks familiar that might be because Roebling’s next project, begun in 1867, was a bridge in New York with a similar design that spans the East River, from Manhattan to Brooklyn; a.k.a. the Brooklyn Bridge.

Back in Ohio we watched the sun set on the Roebling Bridge from the porch of the Christian Moerlein brewpub, which is next to the Great America Ball Park and built on the site of the Reds former home, Riverfront Stadium. As the photos below attest, it was "Bark at the Park" night, a promotion where fans are allowed to bring their dogs to the game.

The next day – another absolutely perfect, blue-sky day – we went back to Cincinnati on our normal route, which takes us across the Ohio River and into northern Kentucky on IH 275 and brings us into the heart of downtown Cincinnati by re-crossing the river from the south and providing spectacular views of the downtown skyline. The view of downtown Cincinnati crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky has definitely got to be in the top five of American city skyline views. While it seems strange to drive into Kentucky to make the commute from the park to downtown it is a quick, easy, pretty drive.

After only three or four u-turns in the middle of city streets we found our way to Eden Park, a beautiful oasis of green space in the hills east of downtown. In one section of the park a tree was planted on Arbor Day in 1882 to honor each former president. This would have been a year after Garfield was assassinated. Harrison’s granddaughter – a sister to the future (1889-93) President Benjamin Harrison – attended the event.

Each subsequent president (or survivors) chooses a variety and a new tree is planted in his (or, theoretically, her) honor. For instance, both of the Bushes chose Magnolia trees, a Tulip tree was planted in 1938 to honor FDR and Clinton chose something called a Swamp Oak (which is actually a pretty good-looking tree). Just one more example of the political savvy of the Kennedys, the tree planted for JFK is a Buckeye tree and underneath it we found a couple dozen big, beautiful buckeyes to add to our collection.

Snagging some more buckeyes under the Kennedy tree

All of that was serendipity. A short walk from the Presidential Grove took us to our original intended destination, the Mt. Adams overlook of the Ohio River (and northern Kentucky). As the photos hopefully do some justice, it is a fabulous view.

In the photos note the obelisk. I’ve included a photo of one of the plaques attached to the monument, which was unveiled in 1929 with President Hoover in attendance. As the plaque indicates the obelisk is a tribute to the Federal government’s massive, century-long effort to “canalize” the mighty Ohio, from Pittsburgh to the confluence with the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois.

From there it was a short, but interesting, drive to the Findlay Market; Cincinnati’s version of the urban farmer’s markets that we have previously visited in Cleveland and Columbus.

Remember in the movie Vacation, the scene where the Griswold family gets lost in St. Louis en route to Walley World? Our drive to the Findlay Market was kind of like that.

Cincinnati’s market is not quite as good as Cleveland and Columbus (and the surrounding neighborhood is A LOT sketchier) but it’s still very nice (if you don't get mugged) and we snagged fresh veggies, steaks and Ohio beers and headed back to the tranquility of our suburban state park home to jog, bike and enjoy the remainder of a spectacular day.

And that reminds me to give a shout-out to Ohio corn. Since we first arrived Betsy has been buying corn at the farmers markets and roadside stands and steaming it, in the husk, in the microwave. I think this Ohio corn might be the best, sweetest corn I’ve ever eaten (and I've eaten a lot).

Finally, check out what this guy is carrying on a sidewalk in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio