Ohio Again

My favorite road is the one I haven’t been on.  We try to route our trips so that we don’t drive the same route both directions, but on this trip we are driving I-70 both ways between Indianapolis and Dayton OH.

The skies have been overcast for several mornings.  This morning the clouds seemed even heavier.  It was warm, but it sure felt like fall was in the air.

We stopped at the American Motorcyclist Association’s Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum.  It was along today’s route, and this was to be a short-distance day.  I’ve been a member of the AMA for over 30 years, but I’d never been to their headquarters or the museum.

The museum is small and focused on the people of the motorcycling world — developers, promoters, racers, famous riders — but there are plenty of motorcycles, too.  Most of the bikes had been made in the US or Japan.  There was little attention to touring, although there was a specialty bike that rode coast-to-coast using less than 15 gallons of gas.  I think the gas mileage was just over 197 mpg.  The thing looked supremely uncomfortable.

They asked us to not touch most things, but there was a Harley with sidecar that we could sit on and in.  Andrea tried it out.  I don’t think there is a sidecar in our future.

We charged the car near Columbus and set off southwest, toward Cincinnati.  The skies finally opened up.  It rained so hard that most people on the freeway slowed down.  We got off onto some back roads, glad to be away from the spray the heavy trucks were sending up.

We took small roads to Yellow Springs.  Walking along the two blocks of downtown, Andrea commented that it looks like a little hippie town.  I think it was a hippie town before there were hippies.  After driving past the large fields of corn and soybeans, and seeing signs for Trump and admonitions that we would have to be born again, it was odd to be here in this hobbit town.

We had lunch in Ye Olde Trail Tavern.  The last time I’d been there was 50 years ago, when I went to Antioch.  The inside of the tavern is still pretty much as I remember it.  Our waitress said she had graduated from Antioch this year, so I guess the college is still going despite its financial troubles.

By mid-afternoon we were just over the border in Indiana.  We checked into our motel and got quarters for doing laundry.  We balked at paying $3.50 for a single-use box of Tide, so we drove down the street to a Kroger and bought the laundry soap we usually use at home.  It’s a big bottle, but it comes to about 11¢ per wash.  Now we have another thing we need to bring with us on these road trips: laundry soap.