There are times in life when plans A all the way through
Z don’t end up working out. It’s at those times when a person resorts to
animalistic need without regard for how he or she may be judged or whether or
not his or her actions are in accordance with local rules and regulations. That
was how our little gang of three was feeling when we crossed into Ohio late at
night. It was drizzling rain when we pulled up at a roadside rest stop to make
our beans for dinner and discuss our options for the coming evening. We had hit
up family and friends and turns out that even with all three of us and in
particular both Tweedy’s and Eric’s knack for networking not a single one of us
had a connection in Ohio. We checked the map for any nearby national forests
and once again came up dry. Next we started checking all of the nearby state
parks to see if any didn’t have hours of operation, but all of them were
already closed. Plans A through Z, and not a single decent possibility. It was
time to exercise our creativity a bit.
First idea was to set up a tent right there at that rest
stop, but after some looking around we found the signs that said camping was
not allowed. Seeing as it was a rest stop on the side of the interstate we were
pretty sure someone would catch sight of our six-foot-tall tent if we were to
pitch camp there regardless. Maybe another roadside pull-off then? No, that
seemed unlikely since we were just outside of a city. The ideas kept being
fired back and forth and ultimately we decided on one of the more bizarre ideas
that most people would probably never consider. We decided that good Christian
folk are supposed to be all about feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless,
and visiting the fatherless and the widow. We are (in technical consideration)
homeless, so we thought that it would be fair to give a nearby Christian church
the opportunity to practice what it preached and set up camp by a church. It
was a Wesleyan church that we ultimately ended up sleeping on the grounds of.
Not only was it a church, but it was also a school. Thankfully we found a
random bunch of trees that obscured the view of our tent so that we slept
without being disturbed despite the fact that while we were breaking camp in
the rain the parking lot was full of cars.
That morning we drove into a park that we had initially
considered sleeping in to make some breakfast. It was called the Batelle Darby
Metro Park, and it was quite comfortable despite the fact that it rained all
morning while we ate our oatmeal, and even continued to drizzle as we hiked
around a bit. Ultimately though I would put it down as a good destination.
So started a long day of just constantly being soaking
wet. Our next destination was Grigg’s Nature Preserve. I have no idea how
Tweedy even found this on Google Maps because the park is small enough when you
walk up to it. The parking lot for it is just big enough for maybe a total of
six cars, and even then you think you must be in the wrong place because on one
side is a busy road, on the other is a residential neighborhood, across from
that is a river that is so developed the banks of it are paved. The good thing
about this is every visitor can clearly tell where he or she is supposed to go—the
little opening in the barbed wire topped chain link fences. Once you step in
though you are transported away from the signs of humanity. Especially that day
with the rain pounding down. The little stream that the boardwalk we were
walking along crossed had swollen the bounds of its usual banks and the whole
place was soaked, it got even heavier when we got to the falls that we had
initially come to see. It was a small natural mecca amongst the ceaseless
sprawl of humanity. And our next stop was to prove to be the same thing. But
first we basked in the spray of these falls combined with the rain from above.
This next set of falls was known as the Indian Run Falls,
and there was a surprising number of people at those falls, especially
considering the state of the weather. I thought for sure that we would end up
being alone there, but I was mistaken. We ran into a few students making a
commercial for Ohio State University, the school they all attended. I was more
in the mood to enjoy the setting then to chat so I left Tweedy and Eric to it
while I wandered on ahead. After admiring the falls we took refuge under a
gazebo to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and plan where to take
refuge from the rain for the next couple of hours. Tweedy and I were feeling
the hurt of not getting our respective social media platforms updated so we
convinced Eric that we needed to take refuge in a local coffee shop and get some
work done.
The name of this Coffeehouse/Bar/Used bookstore was Kafe
Kerouac. For those of you who do not know (which I am going to assume is a
decent number of people seeing as even being an English major does not
guarantee you will catch this reference) Kerouac was part of a literary
movement during the 1950’s known as the Beat Poets. Some think that this
self-appointed title is a reference to the beat of the jazz that they tried to
make their writing sound and flow like, but according to the founders of the
movement it actually referred to a feeling of being beaten physically,
mentally, economically, and emotionally. Anyway, the reason that it was cool
that we three traveling souls should wind up there is Kerouac and his contemporaries
were famous for their love of road trips. In fact Kerouac’s most famous work is
called On the Road. Anyway, I loved
that little place, especially since I was also able to order a cappuccino name
Hemingway. Unfortunately my laptop decided to take the entire time we were
there to update so I didn’t get much written at that point. Eric went about
talking to people though and managed to meet a delightful young lady who had a
little garden that she left the coffeehouse to go back to in order to bring us
back some fresh peppers and tomatoes. Now we didn’t find this out until a
couple days later but some of those peppers were prime—in other words they
turned our beans into an almost impossible to eat due to heat batch of
deliciousness for several nights in a row. We all loved them. Wish I remembered
her name so that I could give her a shout out for growing the best peppers
ever.
That night we managed to find some people willing to give
us space inside of their home to sleep and dry up in. These two loving ladies
would be Tony and Linda. Spry ladies that were supposedly encroaching upon the
later years of life, but you would never guess it from the kind of energy they
had. They treated us to the use of their stove, showers, and even provided ice
cream and Oreos for us to eat. We once again ended up arriving a little late, but Tony
and Linda didn’t seem to mind and we had a fantastic conversation with them until
it was time to fall asleep. The next day we said goodbye to our new found
friends and continued on through Ohio.
First stop was Brandywine Falls inside Cuyahoga Valley
National Park. It was a Saturday and the clouds had finally cleared away, which
we were happy for. What we were not expecting was the huge crowd of people at
the falls that resulted from it being a beautiful Saturday. We’re so used to
wandering off the beaten path or visiting places at the strangest hours that we
forget other people like to see the same things we do and just manage to do it
at a different time and day then we are usually there. Still we had an
enjoyable time and even managed to do a bit of off-trail wandering in order to
get a view of the falls from the base.
On our way up from this little detour Eric bumped into
what I can only assume was a couple out for perhaps their first date ever. I
was able to glean this information from the guy while Eric was chatting up the
girl for nearly thirty-minutes straight. As far as I can tell he was not
intentionally hijacking the poor little guy’s date. In fact I think the girl
was doing as much talking as Eric was if not more. But anyway, we all chatted a
bit and then completed the loop around the park before continuing on to yet
another set of waterfalls. (Ohio seems to have a huge assortment of waterfalls
which makes little to no sense when you are me and thing the state is pretty
flat. Of course as far as the Midwest goes it can almost be considered
mountainous.)
Blue Hen Falls were located in that same National Park
(Cuyahoga Valley), and once again we encountered an endless flow of people, but
once again this didn’t keep us from wandering far off trail, but not after
first checking out the two falls that all the people were there to see in the
first place.
It was down past the second falls where we just kept on
wandering until we happened upon a random skiing hill. This comes back to the
point that I made earlier where as a Westerner I thought Ohio was just slightly
better than Nebraska as far as topographical variation goes, but to the
Midwesterners this was mountain country. In Colorado that skiing hill would
have barely been considered steep and long enough for sledding let alone skiing
and yet this hill had ski lifts that we of course had to climb around on. This
included doing a bit of hand over hand swinging up and down the cable that held
the seats at the bottom while just climbing on top of the entire fixture once
we hiked to the top of the hill where we were able to get some fantastic
pictures of the surrounding area.
Some more wandering eventually led us back to the main
trail and the crowds of people, but not before I sunk up to my knees in mud
(but only for a short moment since I was running—and no, I didn’t break my leg
or twist my ankle when my leg suddenly dropped a foot and a half deeper than I
was expecting *knock on wood*) and climbed a random vine halfway up a tree.
On our way to our next destination for the day we passed
a dead deer on the side of the road, which Eric decided had been hit recently
enough for us to take a slab of meat from it and save it for our beans at a
later time. So ultimately we found ourselves up in Cleveland by Lake Erie in
Wildwood State Park. We had started in another random lakeside park, but
apparently all the rich people around that park owned it collectively and the
public was not welcome. Yeah, those filthy dirty little (words that are not
safe for little sisters) rich people. But the other park worked just as well
for drying out our tent and skipping rocks before we continued on.
The aim was initially to get into Pennsylvania that night
and stay somewhere in Allegheny National Forest, but as we were on our way Eric
heard from his older sister Anne who was actually rather close to us but
heading in the opposite direction back to Colorado. We decided Eric better take
advantage of this opportunity to meet up with family on the road so we met up
with her at a Burger King in Middlefield, Ohio where we bumped into a van full
of Amish while we were waiting for her that we chatted up before they had to
head home.
We chatted for a while with Annie there in the Burger
King and then decided that neither of us were going to get to where we were
initially planning on being that night so Annie did the daring thing and set up
camp with us in the middle of a state games land that night. The next morning
we drove up to Geneva State Park with Annie, once again considering getting
into Lake Erie, but it was raining again, so instead we made some breakfast and
just messed around while we let the tent dry once again under a giant awning.
At that point it was time to say goodbye to Annie and to the state of Ohio.
I was finally going to go “home” to Pennsylvania, and my
was I excited!
