Fledgling Explorers

Dayton isn't on a direct line between Columbus and Cincinnati but it is a good-sized city and I'd heard of it so I wanted to stop long enough to see what it was all about. I had penciled in the National Museum of the US Air Force if there was enough time in our schedule and when Otherworld in Columbus turned out to be closed on Tuesdays that became our backup stop. Once we arrived at the campus of the museum on the outskirts of Dayton we found a convenient picnic table to eat the takeout food we had bought before leaving Columbus.

I was immediately impressed by the museum because it was obviously enormous and even more importantly it was free. Science museum tickets can add up to quite a sum for a family of five. There were four huge hangar like buildings which sequentially covered the entire history of aviation from man's earliest attempts at flight to the exploration of space. I had never given much thought to the amazing fact that only sixty-six years elapsed between the Wright Brothers first flight and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, but seeing the rapid progress in the form of an exhibit really crystallized my understanding of the timeline. Of course the needs and financial strength of the world's militaries during that period of intensive conflict was largely responsible for driving the development of aviation technology and much of the museum was devoted to the role of the US Air Force in that process.

I didn't get out of the museum with my wallet completely intact since there were a couple of VR simulations available which had to be paid for. I didn't participate but Cleo and Ian seemed to think they were worthwhile.

The city of Dayton itself didn't seem to have much appeal although I can't say we explored enough to detect any hidden virtues. As we drove through we only saw nondescript areas with flat, utilitarian buildings with the exception of downtown which had a collection of bland high rises. The neighborhood I had marked as having the most potential was the St. Anne's Hill historic district. This turned out to be an attractive neighborhood of Victorian homes but nothing that I would have found particularly remarkable if I had happened on it by accident.

Cincinnati was the city in our itinerary that I was most looking forward to seeing for the first time. Now that I had been cataloguing the major American cities for some years, Cincinnati was one of the more prominent names that I had no first-hand knowledge of. I often heard the name of the city related to sports because of the longstanding baseball and football teams, and there was a popular sitcom in my youth about a low budget radio station in Cincinnati. My research hadn't uncovered a great number of things to see which is why we had only scheduled two nights here compared to four in Columbus. Most of what I had found centered around the downtown area which was why I had chosen an Airbnb in the West End neighborhood just west of the city center. It was a pleasant unit in a block of two story brick townhouses on a quiet tree-lined street. Our hosts had helpfully provided us with reading material in a rack attached to the toilet paper holder.

We didn't have much time before dinner so we took a short drive to see the Cincinnati Music Hall in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood north of downtown. This iconic building was originally constructed as three adjacent buildings in the late nineteenth century but these were joined together soon afterward by second story passageways. The music hall is considered to be one of the best examples of the Victorian Gothic Revival architectural style in the United States and remains in regular use as a performance venue and a convention center.

The entire section of Elm Street where the music hall was located was filled with beautiful pieces of architecture. The Hamilton County Memorial Building was built to honor fallen members of the military but is now used mainly as a concert venue. There was also a breathtaking block of distinguished Victorian townhouses located next to the deep crimson Transept, once a Gothic church and now an event venue.

All of these amazing buildings were located across the street from Washington Park, an appealing rectangular green space that featured a bandstand and a splash fountain. The park's sharp appearance was the result of a forty-six million dollar renovation that was completed in 2012. Elm Street had the most impressive array of buildings but I would have been proud to live on any of the streets on the periphery of the park.

Element Eatery is a two year old food hall in Madisonville, a neighborhood far from the center of the city. It had a pretty good selection of restaurants including a Cajun spot and mofongo along with the usual ramen and tacos, but the atmosphere fell short of other food halls we've visited in the United States. They had homogenized the space so that every eatery was in an identical booth on the periphery of a cafeteria-like seating area. It really didn't feel much different from a food court at a mall. We ate well enough but probably wouldn't bother going back if we were in Cincinnati again.

The following morning we were pretty excited to visit Findlay Market, a few blocks north of Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine. Having been established in 1852, Findlay Market is the oldest public market in continuous operation in Ohio. The market and surrounding buildings host over a hundred different vendors offering a mixture of produce, meats, seafood, artisanal food products, and souvenir item. There are also several small restaurants in the main market building with a variety of cuisines including Mexican food and a raw bar. Cleo and Spenser went for the burritos while I accompanied Ian to the raw bar where he slurped down a half dozen oysters while reading Crime and Punishment, which he had picked up at the Book Loft in Columbus. The woman shucking the oysters asked him what he was reading, no doubt expecting to see a Harry Potter book, and wrinkled her forehead in confusion when he showed her. "How old are you?" she asked. Ian told her he was ten, but he was going to be eleven soon. She seemed a little reassured when he told her he was about to turn eleven.

The market was fascinating even though it had just opened and there was hardly anyone around. The environment around the market was likewise impressive with blocks of nineteenth century townhouses constructed in the Italianate style that was popular among wealthy German immigrants to Over-the-Rhine. The classic features of these rectangular brick buildings are low-pitched shed roofs with bracketed cornices, decorative heads above the windows, and recessed doorways. The current owners of the buildings seemed to be very conscientious about keeping them well-maintained and cheerfully painted.

The blocks around the market also had some dramatic wall murals on a large scale. Covering a side wall of one entire building was a mural whose style instantly struck a chord of recognition in my mind. It was a young woman with large eyes dressed only in a white peacock which was wrapped around her shoulders. About fifteen years ago I was at an art festival in Miami and I spotted a triptych of paintings of nymphs with hypnotic, liquid brown eyes and curvaceous figures and I bought all three on the spot. The gallery owner was quite excited and brought out the artist to meet me, a young woman named Tatiana Suarez with more than a passing resemblance to the subjects of her paintings. Those three paintings have since occupied a prominent place in every house I have lived in since that day. I immediately recognized those same eyes on that wall in Over-the-Rhine and sure enough there was the artist's distinctive signature. It seemed like a strange coincidence but when I learned that Tatiana has been in high demand for painting murals all over the United States and internationally as well, it was inevitable that one day I would stumble across another one of her works while traveling.

One source of minor annoyance for me when we travel is that all three of the kids are surprisingly dispassionate about zoos, even though i think they make great family excursions otherwise. The Cincinnati Zoo is generally ranked at or near the top of all the zoos in the United States so I decided it was a worthwhile risk to devote a few hours to a walkthrough. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the landscaping along the path from the parking lot to the zoo. It was a fairly hot day but there were misters available at intervals between the exhibits.

Overall I would say the quality of exhibits was pretty good although my kids exhibited their usual casual attitude towards the animals. One of the few times they really perked up their ears was when I told them the story of Harambe, the male silverback gorilla who had to be killed by a sniper in 2016 after he grabbed a three year old boy who had somehow found his way into the exhibit. It was hard to believe eight years had elapsed since that incident since I remembered it so vividly. It was a traumatic episode for the whole country so I could only imagine the impact had been for the city of Cincinnati. The entire gorilla exhibit had to be rebuilt and presumably made completely childproof and escape proof so nothing remotely like that event could ever happen again. The set up they had now seemed very state-of-the-art with plenty of room for multiple gorillas to roam around and have their own space. They were being fed as we passed through by a keeper with a bucket of celery who was tossing the stalks around the enclosure from the top of the cliffs.

We made the mistake of having lunch at the main facility in the center which resulted in an hour wasted between the line to order and waiting for the kids' pizza to appear. By the time that ordeal was over any residual enthusiasm for seeing the remaining animal exhibits had dissipated. Instead we drove about half an hour northeast to the sleepy suburb of Loveland to see the Loveland Castle, a remarkable medieval-style castle built close to the Little Miami River by a man named Harry Delos Andrews over a period of decades beginning in 1929. Andrews served as a medic in World War I and traveled throughout Western Europe afterwards, fascinated by the historic castles that dotted the landscape. He died in 1981 after being burned in an accidental fire on the grounds, still in the process of adding rooms to the castle at the age of ninety-one. When we arrived I was astounded by the scale of the structure and the degree to which it resembled the medieval castles we had seen in northern Italy and the Rhineland of Germany. In keeping with the European theme the castle had extensive, beautifully landscaped gardens. It was hard to believe that we were in the supposedly boring state of Ohio and not an atmospheric hamlet in the Rhine Valley.

Andrews built his castle almost entirely on his own except for some slight assistance from the boy scout troop he supervised, using rocks collected from the banks of the river. He christened the castle Chateau Laroche, which is French for "The Rock". His inspiration was the medieval concept of chivalry which he hoped to reintroduce into society. Towards that end he dubbed his young followers the Knights of the Golden Trail, with the golden trail representing the Ten Commandments. The KOGT continued to enroll new members and there are currently about fifty who are active, dedicated to the reduction of pollution in the neighboring river and other good works. The interior of the castle was no less impressive than the outer walls, with eleven rooms entirely constructed from stones, bricks, and mortar. The rooms contained authentic suits of armor, antique furniture, and collections of medieval swords and tapestries. It was one of the most impressive of the many individual lifetime projects that we've seen during our travels around the United States. There seems to be something about our country that inspires these herculean undertakings, from Dr. Evermor's Forevertron in Wisconsin to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. We've seen them in other countries as well, notably Il Castello Incantato in Sicily, but at nowhere near the frequency that they appear in the States.

I consulted my itinerary again and realized we weren't far from Shaw Farms, a large family farm in the suburb of Milford that has been in continuous operation for more than two hundred years. The Shaws opened a store in 1952 to sell their own fruits and vegetables which has expanded to include food products from other local artisans and farmers. In the fall the farm offers a corn maze and hayrides among other amusements but we arrived too early in the year for those activities to be open. We bought some fruit and other snacks and began looking for something else to occupy us until it was time for dinner.