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!

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!

When in LA, You Must Observe an Octopus and Eat a Doughnut

At least, that's what you must do if you're in LA with me!

Aquariums don't photograph well, so I have to make memories with my brain and not my camera, ugh. Not that there's room in my brain for additional memories what with all the 1980s TV theme songs I've got memorized, but whatever. I did my best!

Nevertheless, I did get a few good shots at the Aquarium of the Pacific:

The kids and I were ALL about these embossing stations for our aquarium guidebooks. It was like a little Junior Ranger activity!

We were OBSESSED with the octopuses. They're so beautiful, and they always seemed so busy!

This kid will NEVER pass up a toddler activity. 

There's her axolotl swimming around on the big screen!

I was also personally pretty obsessed with this Giant Japanese Spider Crab. Its legs are so spindly, and it can grow to be 12 feet!

The only thing the big kid likes better than a toddler activity is a touch tank.

This is the first time that I have EVER encountered a jellyfish touch tank! It was even kind of tucked away in a back area away from the crowds, as if a jellyfish touch tank isn't the coolest thing in the zoo?!?

We touched ALL the jellyfish.

I've only ever seen sand dollars washed up on the beach. I had no idea that they're fuzzy!

We spent most of an hour watching this California Twospot Octopus bop around busily in its tank. 

Considering that we'd gotten to the Aquarium of the Pacific right when it opened, leaving mid-afternoon was a pretty good run, but still, we were only able to convince the big kid to come away with us by reminding her that the next item on our agenda was a DIY food tour of the Long Beach area. I didn't keep track of everywhere we went since we were navigating by committee, but check out my delicious spicy machaca burrito with endless pours of jamaica on the side:

Parking in Long Beach is MISERABLE, but we found a doughnut shop where we could park at a laundromat down the block and sneak over in case there are, like, laundromat parking police--which I'm sure there are! You can't tell by the look of it, but each of us ordered one single doughnut at this shop:

I don't know if they were about to close or the doughnut dude was just overstocked or what, but for each of us, he put our doughnut in its baggy, then literally poured doughnut holes in until each bag was crammed full. They only don't look crammed full in the above photo because we'd been stuffing ourselves with doughnut holes as fast as we could before I remembered that I wanted a photo.

Did we leave room for In-n-Out?

Nope, but we still did our best!

Is the most cliched California experience spending sunset on the beach, your tummy full from In-n-Out?

Probably not, but that's what feels the most like California to me!

Don't worry, because we DID follow our tradition the next day of having the most miserable experience traveling home from vacation. Why does flying home always suck SO badly and in such unique ways? I had a panic attack on my first (and last!) Southwest flight when people kept telling me the seat next to them was saved for literally every single available seat--apparently, you're just supposed to sit down anyway because you can't actually save seats on Southwest, but I did not know that so I just wandered up and down the aisle having flashbacks to lunchtime at my first day in junior high, when I ALSO couldn't find anyone who'd let me sit with them. AND you don't get movies, which I guess is fine because I had my nook but I wanted to read my nook AND watch a movie. But then there was bad weather at our layover airport so we had to go to a different airport, but there wasn't actually room for us at that airport so they wouldn't let us off the plane and we just sat on their runway for two hours. You know what would have made that way more bearable? A movie! After that, we waited another hour to refuel and then flew back to the now super crowded layover airport where we thankfully got squeezed onto the last flight of the night, which was a redeye, so instead of getting home at 8 the previous evening we got home at 6 the next morning and we all went straight to bed.

Each vacation's uniquely miserable return experience is probably the universe's way of making sure I'm happy to be home!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo
• Day 4: Maritime Museum and Somali food
• Day 5: Sea lions and San Diego Padres
• Day 6: La Brea Tar Pits and Beverly Hills
• Day 7: Aquarium of the Pacific and a DIY food tour

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thanksgiving in California: 36 Hours in San Diego

Here's our first day in California--at the beach!

My father-in-law is a Navy vet and thanks to him, we were able to stay on the naval base in San Diego for one night. Here's what the beach looks like outside the Navy Lodge:

I spent much of this beach morning lying flat on my back in the sand, camera in hand so I could photograph the helicopters that kept flying directly overhead:

And here's one of the helicopters:

If you blow up the photo enough, you can see that there is totally someone sticking their helmeted head out the door and looking down at me. They're thinking, "Why is that crazy lady lying in the sand taking photos? Must be a spy!"

That's probably not the last time somebody thought that we were spies, either. I photographed EVERYTHING. Who knows when I'll get to sightsee on a military base again!

After we finally managed to drag the kids out of the water, my father-in-law took us on a driving tour so that I could photograph everything else. There were aircraft carriers (we were back at this particular aircraft carrier later in the evening for "Taps," but I had a giant Starbucks coffee in my hands instead of my camera, darn it)--

Yes, I'm going to show you all sides of every aircraft carrier I saw. I'm also humming the "Top Gun" theme at you, just so you know:

--and submarines--

Yes, I'm photographing a submarine THROUGH A FENCE. I'm totally a spy.

--and the most expensive, ugliest destroyer ever built:

The kids had already been to Cabrillo National Monument before with their grandparents (and earned their Junior Ranger badge, because of COURSE), but my partner and I had never been, so we stopped by for a quick look.

Look, another destroyer!

There's a handy spotting guide at the overlook:

I didn't photograph the commissary, either, but we did get road trip snacks and the best bar of soap EVER while we were there. I did not buy a massive toy model aircraft carrier (darn it). The older kid super wanted a Navy sweatshirt, but we did not buy that, either. Our luggage was already worryingly overweight.

Instead, here's an installation of Bob Hope doing USO tours:



It's really beautiful. Next to it, though, is a giant recreation of Unconditional Surrender, which was really gross because every single person was photographing themselves pretending to look up the nurse's skirt.

Nice way to casually degrade women, Tourists!

The next day, we really needed to leave San Diego and end up at Joshua Tree National Park, but first, we had to make two stops at the kids' top requests.

First, doughnuts for the littler kid!

The night before, we'd stayed at a hotel across from Balboa Park with valet service. As the valet handed my partner the keys to the car that morning, he asked where we were headed, and I told him we were going to Donut Bar.

"You really need to try Devil's Dozen," he replied.

So we did both. I mean, of course. And you know what?

We all liked Devil's Dozen better. So thank you, anonymous valet!

This butterbeer doughnut is from Donut Bar:

While my partner and the big kid were in San Diego by themselves, they'd checked out a dog-friendly beach that was right by their hotel. The big kid LOVED it and longed to go back, so before we left San Diego entirely, we did just that. It turned out to be so awesome, indeed, that we accidentally spent the entire morning there:

The kids really loved random doggies coming up to make friends. And a dog only peed on the big kid's sand castle once, and that was after she was finished working on it, anyway.

I didn't get any photos of us actually swimming in the water, but we totally did. It was cold, yeah, but not after the first couple of seconds. Practically nothing to us ice-in-the-bones frozen Midwesterners:

Well, we WERE pretty cold when we finally finished swimming...

No matter, though, because all we did was hop back in the rental car and hit the road. We were on our way to chollo cacti and Joshua trees!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!