After almost two months at home, it was time to hit the road again on Monday, June 16^th for our first summer camping trip of 2025. Our first stop was in Bluffton, IN, just south of Fort Wayne in NE Indiana. Tuesday was a project day – Mark had a few things he wanted to get done in the trailer. In the afternoon, I made a 45-minute drive South to Marion, IN which is famous for two of its native sons, James Dean and Jim Davis. You may be wondering who Jim Davis is…he created the Garfield cartoon that has been around since 1978. I’ve always loved that lasagna-eating cat, and owned several Garfield toys when I was a kid, so I couldn’t pass up the chance to check out some of the “Garfield Trail” which runs through Marion and surrounding towns. It’s made up of 14 five-foot-tall Garfield statues dressed in a variety of ways. I made it to three of them and they were wonderful; maybe someday I’ll make it to the rest of them.

After my Garfield tour, I hit the local Planet Fitness, and then headed back to the campground where Mark had been hard at work.

On Wednesday, we headed to our first ‘real’ destination, Lebanon OH (located in between Dayton and Cincinnati in SW Ohio). We spent the evening monitoring the weather closely, as severe thunderstorms were moving through and with the possibility of high winds and/or a tornado, we had to stay on top of it to determine if we’d need to head to the campground bathhouse for safety. We had some heavy rain, thunder, and lightning (which now brings on some serious PTSD after lightning struck our townhome in April)…but no wind or hail, fortunately!

On Thursday, we drove South toward Cincinnati, and our first stop was the William Howard Taft National Historic Site. We watched the park film to learn more about our 27^th President and the 10^th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and we toured the home where he was born and lived as a child. He was a reluctant politician, and always aspired to the Supreme Court; he is the only person to have ever held both offices.

Our next stop was a truly magnificent work of Art Deco architecture…Cincinnati Union Terminal. The building has a fascinating story, originally built in the 1930s as a train station, undergoing a few transformations over the years, and now serving as Cincinnati Museum Center which houses three museums. It’s a brilliant reuse, bringing these cultural institutions together under one roof. The rotunda is the largest half-dome in the Western Hemisphere (only the Sydney Opera House is larger in the world) and it is stunning! The mosaics around the rotunda are not original (those were removed when there were plans to demolish the building; they spent some time at the airport, then moved to the Cincinnati Convention Center), but the ice cream parlor tiles are original; that space was originally a tea room.

The Center was hosting a traveling exhibit about Barbie which I thought would be fun, and Mark willingly went along (he was one of just a few men at the exhibit). It was fun to see so many examples of Barbie dolls from their 65-year history. I always enjoy seeing complete dolls; when I was little, my brother liked to decapitate my Barbie dolls and throw the heads up into the gutters on our house. Oh well, I love him anyway!

After a dish of Cincinnati’s own, delicious Graeter’s ice cream, we headed to our final stop of the day, the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known as the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the anti-slavery book that is thought to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War. While our tour guide’s talk was all over the place and hard to follow, we did learn quite a bit about Harriet and the home, both in the 1840s when the Beecher family lived there, and in the 1940s when it served as a boarding house and tavern and was listed in the “Green Book” as a safe stop for African Americans. It was an appropriate way to spend part of our Juneteenth.

Friday took us in the opposite direction, North towards Dayton. We made our first stop at the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument where we learned about Colonel Charles Young who was born into slavery, became the third African American to graduate from West Point, and was the highest-ranking African-American officer in the Army until his death in 1922. Fascinating story of a man who persevered through discrimination and isolation to serve our country. The site also honors “Buffalo Soldiers”, African-American cavalry troops who served until 1951 when the military was integrated.

Our next stop was the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park; it is comprised of several sites which relate to the Wright Brothers and aviation. We took a Ranger-led tour of the Wright Cycle Shop where Orville and Wilbur ran a bicycle shop on the 1^st floor and a printing shop on the 2^nd floor. While these businesses were successful, it was ultimately their flying machine that brought them fame and fortune…and many of the principles of bicycle riding were helpful as they figured out how to steer their glider.

We ventured to another of the Historical Park’s sites, Huffman Prairie Flying Field…this is the location where Orville and Wilbur tested and tried and documented so many attempts and ultimately got their glider into the air for almost 40 minutes. It was cool to see the actual site that played such a major role in the beginning of air travel – overall, a really interesting National Park site!

Our final stop in Dayton was a return visit to the National Museum of the US Air Force. We visited here in 2021 but saw only a small fraction of the massive place, so we went back to see some of what we missed the first time. We spent most of our time in the WWII gallery, and then visited the Korean War and Southeast Asia War galleries (having previously visited the Presidential gallery). The museum is the oldest and largest military aviation museum in the world, with over 350 aerospace vehicles and missiles. It’s such an impressive place and a must-visit for anyone who enjoys military history and/or aerospace. And it was a good counter-balance for the Barbie exhibit on Thursday – lots more testosterone here.

We stopped for dinner and ran a few errands and arrived back at the campground after a very long day…the longest day of the year, in fact (summer solstice!).

On Saturday, I met up with a long-time friend…we’ve known each other since kindergarten (just over 50 years…gulp), but lost touch after high school. Thanks to Facebook, I knew she lives in Dayton and reached out to see if we could connect. It was a fun couple of hours catching up!

We made a longer journey South on Sunday, across the Ohio River, to Williamstown, KY, location of the “Ark Encounter”. It was about 60 miles away but took forever thanks to some backups on the Interstate…we had hoped to avoid traffic by going on Sunday, but no such luck! Anyway, the “Ark Encounter” is a re-creation of Noah’s Ark, built to the exact size specifications as laid out in the Bible…making it over 500 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet tall. It is an incredible feat of engineering & construction, and is said to be the largest free-standing, timber-frame structure in the world. We watched a 30-minute movie about the building of the Ark, from idea conception to ribbon-cutting, which was very interesting. There are three floors inside, each full of exhibits detailing what Noah’s life may have been like. The attention-to-detail is Disney-level – I was thoroughly impressed with how beautifully done everything was, and how every detail was thought out. Absolutely worth seeing!

Monday was a pretty quiet day…we’re on day three or four of a crazy heatwave with the heat index over 100 degrees, and it’s just too darn hot to do anything outside. We decided to drive the 30 miles West to Oxford, OH, home of Miami University where Connor spent four years of his life; he got a new car recently and had mentioned he needed a new Miami window sticker for it, so we figured we’d help him out and pick one up for him…and since the truck is nicely air-conditioned, we didn’t mind spending some time in it!

So that wraps up our time in Southwest Ohio…heading a little bit East tomorrow to the Hocking Hills region just south of Columbus!