Well, it was Memorial Day weekend 2021 and we have not been back to visit friends in Ohio for over a year and a half, so we decided it was time for a road trip :-).
This would be a very busy trip, so we decided we had better do some careful planning. We also decided that we had better put this down on some sort of agenda so we would be sure to get all of the things we wanted to do done and not leave anyone or anything out. I brushed up my Excel skills and created a spreadsheet of days, times, places and people we would visit on the trip, and it really came in handy and enabled us to make this a very stress-free excursion. We even managed to squeeze in a bonus visit with my old buddy, Dave M. and his wife ;-).
So rather than making this an extremely long entry, I am going to put in some links to some of the places we visited so you can look them up if you wish.
To begin with, we established certain "must do/see" things and then built in everything else around those items. The trip was planned for five days "on site" and two days of traveling. We got everything on the spreadsheet and checked our reservations and decided this was doable. Charles Kuralt didn't have anything on us (I suspect lots of you will have to look up Charles Kuralt to understand this reference)!
The complete list of "must do/see" items included a visit with our sister-in-law (Mary), some of our old neighbors and friends, Dylan S's graduation party, lunches with family members, church and breakfast with Warren T. (old WWII friend who just turned 95-years-old), me playing golf with my old golfing gang at the Shelby Oaks Golf Course, playing cards one evening with some old Veteran/VFW friends at the Sidney Veterans Center, driving around our original home town (Zanesville, home of the Y-bridge , Zane Grey and Tom's Ice Cream Bowl ), and dinner with my old Sergeant-Major (Dave B.) and his wife.
The trip consisted of 1,228 "travel" miles and another 200 or so miles of "in and around" miles. So I figured we drove just around 1,500 miles +/- with gas being generally $2.89 per gallon, and stayed in hotels for 4 nights (gotta build up those loyalty points and cash-back bucks for later trips!). BUT IT WAS CERTAINLY WORTH IT!!!
I have included a link to a few pictures (forgot to take more pictures than we could have -- getting old and forgetful apparantly). Roadtrip to Ohio 2021 !!
This COVID year has certainly been a trying time for all of us. Things you used to do, people you used to see, places you used to go -- all of that was pretty much taken away from us, even more so being seperated by 500+ miles. Zoom and Facetime only go so far, so this trip really hit the spot. Sometimes, visiting people (live) is all the therapy we need.
They say travel can leave you speechless but then turns you into a storyteller. This certainly was the case here with us -- we had great stories to tell, old stories to retell, and notes for future stories not yet told.
Hooah
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