Sorry ‘bout no post in 11 days…but we were sorta overcome by a series of events that prevented us from posting…thats my story and Ima stickin’ to it.

When last we left our heroes…they had finished up bearing maintenance at the MORryde factory in Elkhart IN and were getting ready to head over to White Pigeon MI to the Quadra Bigfoot factory where we were scheduled for maintenance on our jacks.

Neil woke up the last day in Elkhart coming down with a cold and spent the next week and a day feeling lousy, then better, then lousy but not as lousy as before then better again pretty much by yesterday. Connie carefully avoided kissing him, breathing the same air as him, and sharing glasses, utensils, and the like but she ended up coming down with probably the same cold about 6 days into his bout with it. As of today…he’s feeling pretty much back to normal and she’s still suffering some with it…but overall it looks like she’s on the way out of it instead of the way in.

Nonetheless…an update on our 11 days.

We headed over to White Pigeon as scheduled and our maintenance there was complete by about 1300 Thursday afternoon and we had no campground reservation until Saturday. He called down to Winton Woods Campground in Cincinnati to see if we could get in early…no joy there so we looked at a couple other options and ended up getting 2 nights at the Wapakoneta OH KoA about 140 miles south from Elkhart. As it turned out…it was a good thing we couldn’t get into Cincinnati early as that was another 120 miles down the road and it was about 1800 by the time we got parked anyway. With Neil feeling poorly…we didn’t do anything in Wapakoneta…didn’t even go out of the campground…just stayed in and vegetated in site 23, a nice pull through gravel full hookup site.

Saturday morning he was still feeling lousy but after drugging himself up we headed out to Cincinnati…it was a shorter drive so we had to coordinate leaving the KoA right about checkout time so as not to have to waste too much time on the way down…but we still had most of an hour to kill so we had lunch and rest period at a rest area as we headed south. We pulled into Winton Woods…which is a county park…and got quickly setup in site 7F for a 5 night stay. We had a couple things scheduled for Fun Stuff© in Cincinnati…but as it turned out we ditched some of them as he was not recovered yet and she was in the initial stages of the disease.

We headed out along the bluff overlooking the Ohio River hoping for some nice views down into the river valley…and we had a wildlife sighting…yeah, this was it for the entire post…a super huge praying mantis. It turned its head towards Neil while he was taking its portrait…and I’m not sure whether it was staring him down or calculating whether he could be lunch…take a look at the closeup and see what ya think.

Here it is from the other side…it was sitting on the fence post by where we parked in Shawnee Lockout Park and was still there when we left 15 minutes later…it had to be 7 inches long.

Couple of little known facts for ya…first…hummingbirds are found only in North America although there are some fossilized ones from a bazillion years ago that were found in Europe…second…praying mantis sometimes prey on them. Don’t know where it’s going to put that lunch…but not my problem.

In the park there is a spring house dating from the early 1800s and a restored cabin from 1795.

The bluff turned out to be mostly a bust…it was what we call a North Carolina overlook…since we first observed the custom of building an overlook but not bothering to trim the trees/bushes so that you could actually overlook something in North Carolina. This is the best Neil could do.

Another day we went to the William Howard Taft Historic Site…which is the house he was born in. It fell into extreme disrepair and was basically falling down before it was designated in the 1970s and then restored in the 1980s. It’s basically like Disneyland though…there are only a few artifacts that actually belonged to the Taft family and even the inside has been restored based not on any photos of the interior but on looking at payment documents found in the house that had things like wallpaper and tile patterns noted on them.

This clock is one of the few Taft owned pieces…the remainder of the furnishings beyond a few portraits and a silver platter is period accurate but not Taft family owned.

The exterior of the house…front door on the right facing side and even the house isn’t original to when the Taft family purchased it. The original house at purchase consisted of just the front half of the house back about to the drainpipe you can see coming down…the portion to the left at the back of the house was built in the years following their purchase. The house went out of and then back into Taft family ownership (they’re pretty famous and important people in Cincinnati over the generations) before being deeded to the park service in the 1970s. 

We drove by the Mushroom House…a private residence in Cincinnati…

And then stopped at Fleishmann Gardens which has the largest gingko tree in the state of OH. Not sure why that’s important…but apparently it is.

With our work in Cincinnati done…we headed out another 150 or so miles east to Hocking Hills State Park and quickly got parked in site 24, a nice back in paved full hookup site. We wondered if we had made a mistake with this reservation on the way into the park…as it’s really steep, curvy, and wooded along the access road…but it turned out to be a pretty decent place…luckily our passenger side faces north so that provides us nice shady places to sit in the afternoons of our week’s stay.

The first day here…we headed out on a 2 mile hike…Connie still felt poorly but decided to bore on…to see three waterfalls…or as I guess I should say waterless falls…there’s a drought in OH right now and the creek/river is not only not flowing, it’s mostly dried up with just a few puddles in places and nary a drop coming over the falls. Neil did take a picture of one of them…but it is too depressing so I’m not posting it here. We ended up shortening our hike and going back to the rig sooner than planned.

On second thought…Connie will want him to post it anyway…so here it is…a place called the BathTub because Upper Falls empties into it.

It’s Sunday afternoon as I post this…and we’ll be here until Thursday morning. We have a few more Fun Stuff© things on the list but depending on how Connie feels we may…or may not…do them. We did pick out a fancy-schmancy dinner place…the Inn at Cedar Falls…that we’ll head out to one night.

Interesting things found on the net.

Not sure how the process would work for this one if it actually happened.

Ya don’t see this at every wedding.

Cyas.