Thursday December 31st - Day 11 of fly and drive trip to Oregon - Oglesby Illinois to Canton Ohio

 I picked last night's hotel based partially on being near Starved Rock State Park.  Starved Rock is, for a park within a few hours of Chicago, a very interesting park full of large boulders and falls and caves etc.  Stuff you don't usually see in Illinois, especially Northern IL.  When I got up this morning it was 18 degrees and the snow from the days before was hard and sharp and my motivation to try to tackle it all early this morning for a hike was very low.  The other destination I toyed with fitting into my trip home was the Hocking Hills area of Ohio.  I could have gotten there today then had 2 nights at a hotel in nearby Logan Ohio. Temperatures were predicted to be warmer there and it is someplace I've been wanting to go for years.  I actually started heading that way this morning but another winter hike by myself seemed like a poor trade for pushing my trip to the limits and only getting back to home Saturday late.  Then I realized that Indianapolis has Skyline Chili, something I love and usually associate with Ohio. So I went to Indy for no other reason than a lunch I wanted.

After a filling lunch partially spent looking at a map of Indiana I decided that there wasn't really anywhere I needed to go in Indiana or Ohio in the winter and I'd really like to have a few days at home with Brian.  My route to Indy was mostly IL 116 East and US 52 East.  There were quite a few miles of random farm roads at the start of the day.  From Indy I went north on I-69 to IN-67 which went for a long ways North East then some really small farm roads East into Ohio. At the border the farm road became OH-210 which I took quite a ways east before taking OH-66 and then just taking whatever was fastest to get to Findlay OH for gas.  That was mostly US-33 and I-75 North.  Findlay to Canton was mostly 2-lane US-224 East.  I had dinner at Subway in Willard Ohio before finishing the drive up.  I was pretty tired by the time I got to the Hyatt Place in Canton.  

The only picture I took all day was near the start of my day where I found the natural gas pumping or compressing station with multiple flares running interesting.




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