Two Days in Cincinnati with My Girl Scout Troop: On the Second Day, We Got Some Education and Ate Ourselves Silly

The previous evening, all my Girl Scouts were still going strong when I was beyond ready for bed. I left them to their own activities of working on photo embellishment crafts for their Ambassador Photographer badge, playing card games (Professor Noggin is still a hit even with these big kids!), eating snacks, watching TV, and just generally having a lovely time together, but I asked that before they, too, headed up to bed, they load and start the dishwasher.

I woke up on this morning long before any teenagers, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of cold-brew coffee from the refrigerator, and I found that the kitchen? Was PRISTINE! Not only had the kids loaded and started the dishwasher, as requested, so that all the dishes were sparkling clean and ready for breakfast, but they'd also tidied up and organized our kitchen island full of snacks, and spray cleaned the stovetop and all the counters, The space looked as nice as it had when we'd checked in!

I LOVE traveling with teenagers!

The oven was still not working, so the camping-style breakfast sandwiches we'd envisioned, with all the different ingredients baked on sheet pans, then sandwiched inside English muffins, wrapped in foil, and warmed up back in the oven, were a bust, alas. But at least breakfast sandwiches, unlike the previous night's pizzas and cookies, are amenable to being cooked on the stovetop. After my first cup of coffee, I prepped leftover meats and veggies and cheeses that kids might like to mix into omelets or scrambles, then whenever a teenager appeared, I directed her away from my jug of cold-brew coffee and towards her own homemade breakfast prep.

If a kid told me she'd never cooked her own egg before, I just handed her off to another kid who had. Stretch those leadership skills, Girl Scouts!

We had a REALLY full day of sightseeing ahead of us, so as soon as we'd all finished breakfast, we packed up and headed back out into the city. I 100% had a panic attack about the lack of parking in downtown Cincinnati, and at one point, as I drove in circles around the city streets, pretty sure that our entire lives would just be circling these same five blocks until we died, a Girl Scout in the passenger seat literally held my phone up so my co-leader driving the other car could coo reassurances at me via speakerphone, so hallelujah that eventually an extremely kind parking attendant of a completely full parking garage directed us to another garage that had space for us.

It turns out that Pink was playing a concert in the downtown baseball stadium that night, and everyone in the world was planning to be there!

But first, a museum!

The Ohio River was a very important crossing for the Underground Railroad, and there are numerous important Underground Railroad sites in both Ohio and Indiana, so we planned to spend the morning at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to educate ourselves on these topics of local and national history.

The museum was VERY interesting, and I think we all learned a ton, but sensitive content warning: the exhibit on contemporary human trafficking is going to be way too dark for a lot of younger kids. 

There were also art and fashion exhibits--

Look who has now graduated to Troop Helper!

--and the incredible exhibits on the Underground Railroad.

Y'all. This is a literal 1800s slave pen:

One day, out of nowhere, a nearby property owner on the Kentucky side of the river called up the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and claimed that on their property was an old tobacco barn that local legend said had once been used as a slave pen. Would the museum be interested in it?

Through archival research and physical evidence, the museum was able to verify that this building was, indeed, an actual slave pen. They had it carefully removed from the site, then carefully rebuilt, exactly as it had been, inside the museum. 

It's so sad, and so powerful, and such a testament to the importance of knowing your local history. Neighbors transmitted this story of the building's former life from generation to generation, orally, from the early 1800s to today. People passed the story on to the current property owner, who had no historical connection to the property and no way of otherwise knowing its history. And that property owner, instead of discounting the story or just ignoring it, recognized its importance and reached out to the museum. It wasn't too tough to verify, but without that word of mouth, and that property owner's initiative, that slave pen would be rotting anonymously in its field today, because historians don't just roam the back roads, looking for important things that have been forgotten, and they don't just troll the newspaper archives, looking for places that might still be there. It's our job to preserve our own local histories, to pass down stories to the next generations, and to research our own properties and families to see if there's something important to discover.

At least, that's what the docent said to me when I mentioned that I've got kind of a weird old building on my property, too. I was all, "Oh, but it's not important like THIS building!", and she was all, "Well, why don't you get your butt down to your county archives and make sure." So I guess I have a weekend project this autumn!

You can see more about the slave pen here.

I also thought that the exhibit on other local sites important to the movement of enslaved people was interesting. The photo below says that it's a buffalo trace, but I think it looks like a holloway!

Eventually, six hungry Girl Scouts and two hungry adult chaperones left the museum and walked a couple of blocks over to our meeting point for our food tour!

I was VERY excited that the kids picked this activity! I'd never done anything like it, and it was so fun! It was part walking tour, in which we'd follow our guide while she told us about the history of Cincinnati and its local food scenes, and part tasting experience, as we dipped into several restaurants and shops and markets and ate a sampling of their offerings. 

bangers and mash at Nicholson's Pub

Tyler Davidson fountain: it's an actual water fountain, too, and has a spigot you can drink from!

This is the hotel where Pink was, and there's the car waiting to take her to the stadium.

The tour ended with Belgian waffles at Findlay Market. Funny that a year ago, I'd never been to a downtown market like this, and now I've been to two different ones in Ohio and two different ones in London!

We practiced our food photography during the tour. Those Ambassador Photographer badges aren't going to earn themselves!

The kids enjoyed browsing around the market, and a few bought delicious souvenirs. My troop helper "forgot her credit card," and yet still ended up with some fudge somehow, ahem. College students are supposed to be spoiled when they're back home with you!

Not gonna lie: I was too full after that food tour, and the overwarm, overcrowded streetcar back downtown did NOT help, blurg. Time to all get some fresh air and some beautiful photos of the river by walking the Roebling Suspension Bridge!

As a bonus, at the time there was actually a Roebling Suspension Bridge photo contest underway, which I encouraged all my Girl Scouts to enter... and one of them WON!!!

And then somehow the kids were all hungry AGAIN, so we walked to Graeter's and bought them all ice cream before finally heading back to our cars that were safely and miraculously parked in the middle of the downtown chaos.

I was so tired that I blasted my Favorites playlist the whole way home and sang along loudly to every single song to keep myself revved up, and the kids in my car were so tired that not one of them uttered so much as a peep in protest. You're welcome for the two-hour concert, Girl Scouts!

Postscript: I wrote a three-star review of our Airbnb, mentioning the oven problem and the host's lack of communication. The next day, the host hit me with a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request for over a hundred dollars, claiming that we'd stolen a USB port and broken the dishwasher door. When Airbnb asked me if I wanted to file a rebuttal, I wrote them a 29-page Google Doc that used photographic evidence both from our stay and the Airbnb's listing to prove that the host was lying, and documented a pattern I'd uncovered in which whenever a guest posted a negative review of their stay, this host would write a public response that said they were going to file a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request against them. 

Airbnb decided the issue in my favor. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!