We Did The Entire Butler County Donut Trail In One Day Because Sugar Makes You Strong

 

.....or it does something bad to your A1C. My doctor definitely mentioned one of those!

Whatever. The point is, you know we love ourselves a trail! My favorite trails so far have been the Garfield Trail, where the kids earned fun patches for their Girl Scout vests, the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, where we were promised T-shirts but they ran out so instead they gave us hats and Mr. Craft Knife was so distraught about this downgrade that the little kid designed us all our very own We Licked the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail T-shirts (Lactose Lovers Unite!), and the Dayton Aviation Heritage Trail, where we earned my very beloved Wilbear Wright who comes with me on all my travels now because his namesake used to love going new places (such as the sky!).

Oh, there was also the full year that I dragged everyone around on an Indiana Culinary Trail because I wanted a set of wine tumblers!

We love a road trip, and we'll take one on the stupidest excuse. Because if you don't make a stupid excuse to go on a road trip, then how will you discover that there's a restaurant serving authentic British cuisine north of Indianapolis? Or a giant rock in Southern Indiana that you can hike to AND buy an anthropomorphized version of on a T-shirt?

How, I'm asking how, HOW WOULD YOU OTHERWISE learn that people are simply allowed to build their own experimental aircraft, as long as they get it inspected by authorities to make sure that it's not literally just a flying bomb

I'm telling you my greatest lesson so far: if you don't follow life's off-beat trails, you'll never discover life's experimental aircraft that are allowed to fly at life's unmonitored airfields.

Also, it was the big kid's birthday, we were all in the precious same place at the precious same time, and we all had the whole day free. That in itself is a sign that it was meant to be!

Fun fact: we'd originally planned to do this whole Butler County Donut Trail not on the big kid's birthday but on July 5th, which we also all had free. But then when I went through all the donut shop websites to get their opening hours, I discovered... well... DID YOU KNOW THAT EVERY DONUT SHOP IN BUTLER COUNTY IS CLOSED ON JULY 5?

Genuinely, what is that about?

So anyway, a couple of weeks later, on a day that is safely not the day after a federal holiday, off we went upon a strictly ordered trail that maximized the somewhat limited opening hours of the busy independent donut shops of southwest Ohio:

It's funny, because this place had what would turn out to be my absolute favorite donut of the day. Actually, I think this thing is my absolute favorite donut of all time! I'm thinking about it right now and wishing I had it in front of me.

Here it is, in the photo below. Any guesses?

Nope, not the plain glazed that the big kid always likes. Not the fried cinnamon roll that the little kid tried. It's this glorious beast:

It is a giant croissant, flattened somehow and covered with chocolate ganache and chocolate chips. It was INSANE.

And it turns out that there were two Ross Bakery locations on our donut trail map, so I got two of them!

Organizational note: you can freeze donuts. We all basically ordered whatever we wanted at every stop, did not even attempt to eat it beyond the first couple of stops, and put everything into individual plastic baggies inside a bigger freezer baggie when we got home. To warm donuts up you can microwave them for a few seconds until they taste like they're hot from the fryer, or you can do what I do and put the plastic baggie with your morning donut in it out onto the kitchen table the night before to defrost.

If only I could remember what my doctor was saying about my A1C...

Oh, well. Maybe it will come to me after I eat 11 more donuts!

You know you've been on the road too long/eaten waaaaay too much sugar when you, as a family, cannot stop laughing about what is objectively a perfectly normal sign that you don't even have a decent photo of because the person who was supposed to be taking the picture did not understand the assignment. Regardless, there was a storefront for a pizza restaurant. With a bar. That proclaims that it is OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT. For the rest of the entire day, we were all, "Omg, it is 11 pm and I would like an alcohol. I wish there was a BAR that was OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT!"

"Well, *I* wish there was a BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT that also had pizza!"

"But only TRUE SLICES of pizza! Not slices of falsehood!"

"So you want, like, a combination TRUE SLICE PIZZA/BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT?"

I dunno, y'all. We'd gotten up pretty early for this. We hadn't eaten any protein yet other than the bacon on Mr. Craft Knife's maple bacon pizza three donut shops ago. I think we were all a little loopy.

Actually, I just looked up that pizza place, and their tandoori chicken pizza sounds DELICIOUS.

Loopy as I was, I also lost my damn mind with glee when I discovered that Jupiter Coffee and Donuts was having a Summerween event that week!

I'm pretty sure I got one of every Summerween donut, though they're currently still in the freezer.

This was my second-favorite donut of the day. Something something sour cream something?

The beauty of us all being free this day to do the donut trail is that it was actually a weekday, so we could go straight to the Butler County tourism office with our completed passports to pick up our shirts.

On the way, we were all, "Omg, they're going to be so excited that somebody completed the trail! They're probably going to want to take photos of us for their social media--is everyone's hair nice? Ooh, what if we're interviewed? Should we have talking points?"

Lol. We had to STAND IN LINE to get our shirts, there were so many people there for the exact same reason. #notsoquirkyafterall 

But our goal was indeed achieved!

The kids never did inherit the passion for free T-shirts that their father and I honed during college, when people would put tables outside the Student Center offering free T-shirts for signing up for a credit card--AND WE ALL DID IT! I blame their disdain on the fact that 1) I don't think colleges (or the finance industry?!?) allows that kind of shit anymore, and 2) neither of the kids' colleges charge to use the laundry machines, so they do not know the joy of being able to put laundry off for one more day cause you just scored a free T-shirt.

Regardless, Mr. Craft Knife and I still hate doing laundry, and I personally think that these T-shirts are legit. There's a smiling cup of coffee!!! And the donut is holding a little flaaaaaggggg!!!!!!!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 2)

What a difference a day makes!

The day before had been, if not quite Fool's Spring, mild enough that while packing for this overnight trip I'd considered not even bringing my coat, but eventually tossed it into the car anyway, because I'm no fool.

Well, I kind of *am* a fool these days--perimenopause brain fog is hitting me soooooo hard!--but not about the weather, at least.

But regardless, I was VERY glad to have that coat on this day, because look at the snow!

And, of course, the mound!

I promise that I DID do some non-mound activities with my daughter on this trip. We walked around Columbus, browsed a giant bookstore, ate hot chicken that bothered my stomach all night because I'm old, she got me to do an impression of Tor Thom doing the world's worst impression of Kip Grady from Game Changer, she egged me into griping so loudly about the Florida Panthers NHL team that a random guy glared at us (Panthers fans are everywhere, gag!), and just that morning I left my husband sleeping in our hotel room, picked her up from her apartment, and drove her back to our hotel to eat waffles and watch the Olympic men's hockey Gold medal match with me. I had not yet been outraged by the ham-handed misogyny of Team USA, and so we had a glorious time treating the breakfast buffet like a sports bar and cheering a bunch of jerks on to victory. 

But as much as I miss this kid when she's away at school, we're not really sit-and-yappers--you can yap just as well when you're poking around a pre-Columbian mound set in a cemetery next to an abandoned church!

I think it's so interesting to have a mound in a churchyard. The Fairmount Presbyterian Church was organized in 1834, so sayeth this History of Licking County.

I must warn you, though, that the same History of Licking County also sayeth this:

          The mound at Fairmont Church was a lookout mound and it was opened at one time but, I am told, it didn’t contain much. A number of smaller mounds like this have disappeared because of plowing fields over the years. In 1860 a keystone, a small triangular shaped sandstone engraved on both sides with Hebrew letters, was found in a mound near Newark. A Decalogue tablet was also unearthed in this mound. The tablet contained an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments copied almost entirely from Exodus 20 in the Bible. For years, it was regarded as a hoax, but two Hebrew scholars along with some scientists confirmed it to be true. This tablet is seven inches long, black limestone, and was found in a circular light brown sandstone box with a whitish cement at the edges. The “Holy Stones” (five in number) were found near the intersection of Rt. 13 and Interstate 70 and at another location in Madison Township are still a subject of controversy, but scholars now think that perhaps people from the Mediterranean sea area reached this country in the days of the mound builders. This was long before Columbus came and these people left their messages carved on stones found in the Adena Burial Mounds as well as on rocks throughout North America.

 The author is referring to the Newark Holy Stones, which were a Big Deal back in the 1860s but have since gone the way of the various Oklahoma "runestones" that were talked about when I was a kid. 

Wait, it looks like some people are still talking about the Oklahoma runestones! I guess the Newark Holy Stones have just gone the way that the Oklahoma ones have NOT, lol!

Anyway... Vikings and runestones and Hebrew tablets and angel-human hybrids aside, I can't help but wonder what the congregation of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church thought about putting their Christian cemetery around that clearly pagan monument. It reminds me that when the Sutton Hoo ship burial was excavated, archaeologists discovered that people hundreds of years after that burial, long after all knowledge of it had passed, had been burying their dead around that then-mysterious mound, too. Did that feeling of awe that you get when looking at an ancient monument feel like religious sentiment? Was it the sense of ancient history and connection to the past that they thought translated well to a cemetery? Or did the place maybe just seem important, and that's what people wanted to connect with?

Regardless, it does make a lovely setting for photos, and I have to think that even though the mound is clearly being regularly mowed, it must fare better as cemetery property than it would have in a farm's acreage.

I need to come back here and take more photos on a sunny day!

Okay, remember this map of the earthworks as Squier and Davis saw them back in 1848?

So far, I'd seen most of what was remaining, i.e. the Great Circle (bottom right) and the Octagon and Circle (top left). But there's one little bit left that I hadn't yet seen...

Specifically, this bit!

The site is pretty depressing, bordered by a neighborhood, some kind of warehousy/factory-ish building, and a highway that, incidentally, used to be where the Ohio and Erie Canal ran instead:

The Goodwill at the top is where we got the kid a couple of shirts for job interviews and where I'm still pissed that I didn't buy two vintage green glass ashtrays. The kid said they were tacky, but what the hell does she know? The gas station in the middle is the closest parking I could find to the intersection of the street with the railroad tracks just north of it, which is where the semicircular earthwork on the Squier and Davis map was until it was demolished to make that street and railroad tracks. I hate civilization sometimes.

But still, we made the best of it and had a proper wander in that limited space:

The ridge that's running horizontally across the photo below is the top left edge of the square--I'm inside the square, and the kid is outside of it. The ridge in the background is the outside edge of the avenue that would have led straight towards that now-demolished semi-circle enclosure:

There's an opening where the two ridges meet, but I don't know if that's how it was originally. I also can't imagine that the original square and avenue earthworks were this short:

Because I'm curious and I waste my focus on that which is inconsequential, I even got into Google Earth's historical maps to see if maybe the ridges had looked different, taller or shorter or maybe more of the avenue was evident, 20 or so years ago, but it doesn't look like anything has really changed. And then I got VERY distracted looking for Kinzer Mound in South Salem, which is on the National Register of Historic Places but has its address redacted so I tried searching old Google Earth images, reddit and Facebook posts, property records for the name "Kinzer," etc., and never did find it, but I did waste almost two hours and there's apparently a cool covered bridge in South Salem that I now want to see, so there's that!

Here's me also checking Google Maps to see how far I'd have to walk and in what direction to get to the Great Circle and the Octagon:

The Great Circle is just about three-quarters of a mile from here, and the Octagon is about a mile and a half. Perhaps an adventure for another day!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 1)

Well, *technically* all I wanted to do was visit my college kid since she isn't coming home for Spring Break--but she's happy to tag along with any adventure, as is my husband, so that worked out just fine!

Honestly, though, my fever-pitch fervor for earthworks is SO bad. We'd barely rolled onto campus and hugged the kid's neck before I was all, "Sooo... y'all wanna catch up while we walk around Octagon Earthworks?"

Happily, they did!

I even got to play tour guide, because thanks to that time that I just happened to be driving the kid back to school on one of the four days a year that it was formerly open to the public (it used to be leased by a golf course that had, like, a million-year lease already signed, but now it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so Ohio was finally able to boot them and open it up properly to the public), I'm the only one who's been there before!

There's a viewing platform that elevates you a bit above the terrain so you can see some of the earthworks from above:

That's really important, because once you're in them the scale is so massive that it's very hard to visualize what you're walking within:

That outer perimeter isn't really there anymore, nor are the paths that lead away, but you can around walk inside the circle and the octagon.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Squier and Davis work that mapped the site is now old enough to be in the public domain, so here:

It's crazy that the site was mapped AFTER they built the Ohio and Erie Canal through part of it, but I'm going to talk more about that later, because OBVIOUSLY I went over there to investigate what was left.

Here it is also in outdoor banner format, lol, and yes, I DO want a large-scale weather-proof map just like this one!

It's so ridiculous that when the site was a golf course, that elevated viewing platform was the only place you were allowed to be to look at the earthworks, because you can barely see them from that platform! Here I am on the platform, looking straight ahead at the path that connects the circle to the octagon. To the left, if I crane, I can see the closer part of the circle, and to the right, if I crane, I can see the closer couple of walls and one mound from the octagon:

But now, THIS is my favorite sign here!

Octagon Earthworks is a lovely site to simply stroll around. Just as promised, we walked the inner perimeter while catching up and gossiping:

The trees wouldn't have been here when the site was in its original use, but there are a few trees that are allowed to grow presently. This site also used to be an encampment for the Ohio National Guard, then part of it was a potato field... and then came the golfers!

Three geniuses, one of whom is graduating with a degree in Environmental Science this May, another of whom still brags an awful lot about the very thorough Ohio state study she led her little homeschoolers through once upon a time, stared in bafflement at this nut for ages before one of us (not me, sigh...), finally said, "It looks kind of like that candy? Oh, it's a buckeye!"

These two really liked the open space within the octagon best:

You can sort of see one of the walls leading off into the distance to the left, but the rest is too far away. The space inside is so big!

I kept wandering off to go hug the little mounds that block the entrances, though. I love a little mound!

So, it's well-established that I love a dedicated, protected earthworks site. I mean, of course! But what I LOVE is a poky, little-known, obscure, under-studied earthwork that's encroached upon by modern civilization in some weird way. I really like that undercurrent of something other and ancient behind the trappings of the everyday. I also love the research aspect, because while these preserved earthwork sites are well-known and Googleable, most of the earthworks still extant are unstudied, poorly mapped, and largely forgotten. 

There are a couple of good historical resources for searching out the thousands of minor mounds in Ohio. The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio has a county-by-county map that's impossible to parse for specific locations, but does show the overall spread and general vicinity, as well as wealth of now-forgotten mounds. The book, for instance, says that the kid's college town used to have 20 known mounds, and now there is definitely just one! A more useable resource is this ZeeMap of Native Sites of Ohio, which looks to have placed the sites from the archaeological atlas onto a Google Map. Whenever I've been able to match one of its mounds with the real mound, they've lined up perfectly, but there are sooooo many sites on ZeeMap that also look like absolutely nothing in real life. Is the site simply gone, or is the ZeeMap location off?

Earlier this year, I treated myself to the very sketchily titled Nephilim Chronicles: A Travel Guide to the Ancient Ruins in the Ohio Valley, because boycotting the economy doesn't count if it's an independent, self-published author. If you can overlook the author's premise that the mounds are the burial sites of angel-human hybrids, it's actually a fairly contemporary guidebook to many of the minor mounds noted in that archaeological atlas and on the ZeeMap. 

And that's what I used to direct us here!

The mound is presented completely without context adjacent to a community sportsball field, but it's this one. 

Over 2,000 years old, and we can just drive up to it, walk around it, and then hop back in the car to head over to spend the evening at the biggest bookstore in Ohio.

Because boycotting the economy doesn't count if you buy it in an independent bookstore!

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20 Hours in Ohio, and Free Doughnuts are a Lie

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 next morning, I picked our breakfast spot solely because of this TripAdvisor review that lauded the complementary DIY coffee bar and complementary serve-yourself doughnuts:



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!

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