You do not have to work hard to convince me to take a trip with you, ESPECIALLY if you tell me that I can pick some of the stops.
So when the younger kid came to me with the information that the lead singer from her favorite band was going to be playing a concert in Columbus, Ohio--
--and she suggested that if we went, maybe I'd like to also do a little sightseeing along the way, she basically barely had time to put a period at the end of her sentence before I had concert tickets in my online shopping cart.
And a couple of weeks later, there we were at this bar in Ohio!
Do you guys like to stand as close as possible at concerts, or are you calm and happy to stand at the back? I'm short, and I like to stand in the front so I can see, although a lifetime of this has definitely contributed to my current hearing loss and the front of the crowd, pressed against the stage, is the last place I'll want to be when the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits. Oh, well. I wasn't planning on surviving the zombie apocalypse, anyway...
Although Jake Ewald didn't play all the Slaughter Beach, Dog deep cuts that the kid had been hoping for, he did play one of their biggest hits, "Summer Windows"--
--so my own personal basic bitch self was satisfied:
I didn't know Ladybird before the concert, but this is my favorite song of theirs now:
The DIY coffee bar was as indicated and was awesome, but y'all, the complementary serve-yourself doughnuts was a LIE!!!!! They did indeed have serve-yourself doughnuts, but you for sure had to pay for them.
I think that TripAdvisor reviewer accidentally stole herself some doughnuts...
Ah, well. My doughnut-less but very en-coffeed breakfast was delicious:
Afterwards, I managed to snooker us into not one, but TWO sightseeing stops!
Obviously, if you're going to Ohio, you HAVE to visit an ancient Native American mound:
Shrum Mound is said to be an Adena burial mound--
--but as far as I can tell, it's never been excavated or even really researched, so I'm not sure how accurate that identification is. It's right next to a quarry, across the street from a housing development, and next door to another house, though, so probably its biggest claim to fame is that it wasn't destroyed the same way that whatever other earthworks were surely around it must have been. For example, there used to be a mound twice as tall at the intersection of Mound and High streets, but it was destroyed in the 1830s.
Here it is with me for scale!
Since it's roughly on our way home, I was also able to convince everyone to detour over to the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument:
The kids and I have been here before, but didn't realize until we got there that back then it was open "by appointment only," so this is the first time I've stepped foot inside!
There weren't a lot of artifacts inside, but the signage was VERY informative. I didn't even realize until this moment that I didn't actually know what a buffalo soldier was!
Charles Young's story is very interesting, and I'd love to read a more substantive biography of him. Apparently, his whole life, during his education and his career, he suffered from systematic, institutionalized racism, and he just... persisted!
He did incredibly well for himself, and worked consistently to lift others up with him, but who knows what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been beaten down at every opportunity?
Racism is so depressing. Let's eat an apple fritter about it:
Will we be able to complete the Butler County Donut Trail in a timely fashion, considering that most of our trips to Ohio are for college drop-offs and pick-ups?
I don't know, but I'm fully prepared to get diabetes trying!
P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of travel spots and activities around the Midwest and the world? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
No comments:
Post a Comment