Road Trips and Hike Reports

St Clarisville OH was really an inexpensive convenient alternative to staying at the Wheeling Island Casino in Wheeling WV.  We went to the casino late Sunday night so our start Monday morning wasn't very early.  The drive home was partly up OH-7, a highway which very closely follows the scenic but sometimes industrial Ohio river for hundreds of miles along Ohio's border with West Virginia and Indiana amongst a few other states I think.  We took it from St Clairsville to East Liverpool or about 60 miles.  From there I tried OH-170 north out of East Liverpool about 30 slow but scenic miles until Petersburg Ohio, along the Pennsylvania border.  From there we took local roads North and East going past the bizarrely named municipality of S.N.J.P Pennsylvania , the first few paragraphs at least of the Wikipedia page about it are worth reading. Next up we drove on the farthest North (and free) 20 miles of PA-376, a road generally associated closely with tolls and Pitt...

The weather forecast was positively dreadful for the weekend.  We decided in the middle of the week that we would embrace the bad weather by choosing something that didn’t rely on good weather.  So I redeemed some Hyatt points for a 1 night stay at the Hyatt Regency Columbus and we stated Friday night on the way at a casino in Salamanca NY . The casino night was fun but ran late.  The drive went pretty well despite Ohio’s larger than average number of dorky passing lane hogs.  Even 15 years ago when I would go to Ohio with Drew (who is from Ohio) it always seemed like people were on sedatives there.  They have big freeways though with 3 lanes or more each way even in rural areas so that helped.  I was surprised to see signs for Mansfield on the way.  Mansfield is home of the catchily named ‘North Central Ohio Industrial Museum’ which came on my radar as a possible stop on a trip to or from Indiana I hope to make at some point.  So we diverted to ...

My Dad's flight out of KC was at 6:05 am. So we did our best to get to bed before 8 pm on Friday night.  We were awake slightly before our 3 am alarm time.  We got to the airport before 4 am so my Dad certainly had plenty of time to navigate through it.  I headed East on I-435 from the airport then south on MO-291 and South on I-470 until I got to US-50.  I then stayed on US-50 all the way through Missouri until it dumps onto I-44 in the far Western suburbs of Saint Louis.  To get around STL I took I-44 East to I-270 and eventually I-255 and finally a few miles on I-64 until that road crossed US-50.  Then I drove all of IL and IN on US-50 East. I had hoped to make it as far as Cincinatti OH before calling it a night Saturday but as it started to get dark, my 13 hours of being awake with a short night of sleep the night before suddenly seemed like plenty even though I still had a few dozen miles of Indiana left before entering Ohio.  I stayed in the sma...

I had some early morning work to do on the 4th of July.  Even better, since we were in Central time the work was an hour earlier than it otherwise would have been.  So I got up at 5 am and headed down to the hotel bar to shut down some servers in Rochester remotely.  After I finished that work I took a little walk alone around the area of the hotel to give Brian a little more time to sleep.  I also got a jug of water and some cash from the bank.   When Brian was up we headed out to visit my friend Pat in the far suburbs of Chicago.  We had a really great bagel at Big Apple Bagels in Aurora Illinois.  For a franchise place, the food was really satisfying and the owners clearly have a lot of regulars and it was surprisingly satisfying watching the interactions.  I brought some bagels for Pat and we visited for about 90 minutes. After Pat's we drive North along the Fox River on IL-25 and IL-31.  I always found the Fox scenic and relaxing....

 This was an epic long hike.  I had been to this park once, by myself in October of 2019 I think.  I did a beautiful walk from the covered bridge (which is the central part of the trail network for many) to the fire tower and back. This gigantic loop hike from AllTrails however was a huge connect the dots adventure from a big dam, to Lyons Falls, through Hemlock Gorge and a few other park features ending, unexpectedly for us, at the very bottom of the dam with 175 stairs leading back to the top near our parked car.   The weather was warm but mild and nearly perfect for the entirety of our hike.  There were quite a few cars parked at the various trailhead parking lots but the park was so large and our route so ambitious and spread out that there wasn’t anywhere on the trail that we saw more than maybe 2 families together.  All together we did see enough dogs to fill a medium size dog pound though! It seemed like every couple or family had at least open canin...

 Our long weekend in Ohio started with a long drive.  On the way we took mostly US-20 West and then NY and PA 5 along the shoreline of Lake Erie.  The lighthouse was an impulse stop. Brian was driving and I was looking on the web and saw that it was only open until to and it was nearly 1 pm when we got there so I imagined we might be able to catch the last tour of the day.   We did catch (or rather cause there to be) the last tour and our tour guide, Dave (?) was very talkative and knowledgeable.  I noticed that he seemed very aware that different people find different aspects of the Lighthouse and museum interesting.  Besides the centerpiece of the lighthouse itself, the lighthouse keeper’s house is part preserved dwelling, part military museum.  There were little trinkets like a set of cost guard china and lots of domestic housewares etc and also larger things like the way the house itself was structured to keep the lamp oil away from the main part o...