Ohio (part 4, the finale)

Just thought I'd start this post with a shot of Dave & Lana's house in Cincinnati and one of their cats Shadow and Smudge (who can only be differentiated by the fact that one wears a red collar, the other blue)...

     


Dave is a Methodist pastor. He put in twenty years or so as such in the U.S. Army, much of that time stationed in Germany. He now has his own church in Cincinnati and this is where my last sunday in Ohio started off. Unfortunately for me it was laity sunday and so one of the members of the congregation gave the message/sermon for the day, which I should hasten to add was quite good by the way as she spoke about her personal struggle with alcoholism. I only say it was "unfortunate" in the sense that it would have been nice for me personally to actually hear Dave preach the main service.

Below are some shots of the church. The second one shows the line of bell ringers rehearsing just prior to the service. In the third you can see Dave (with his shaved head) talking to one of his congregation before the service and the fourth is just a general interior shot I took from the balcony after the worship service had ended...

     

     


After church and sunday school, Dave and Lana took me to lunch at Skyline Chili. It's really just a fast food type of joint—although you sit down and a waitress takes your order and serves you—but I'm a chili fan and I'd never heard of such chili-specializing restaurants before. Apparently there are two such chains in and around the Cincinnati area: Skyline Chili (see also wikipedia) and Gold Star Chili (see also wikipedia). I didn't get to Gold Star, but I enjoyed Skyline. Judging by their menus one appears to be a knockoff of the other. Skyline was established in 1949 and Gold Star arose in 1965 so obviously Gold Star is the knockoff (not that there's anything wrong with that). Anyway, when we ate at Skyline there was an old Corvette parked out front...




After lunch they drove me around the beltway loop circling Cincinnati just to see some of the area in general. First pic below is a shot of the Cincinnati skyline (in the generic sense this time, not chili) in which you can see Paul Brown Stadium (in the distance on the left), home of the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals. Then there's a closer view of the stadium. After that is an attempt at a shot of a train yard we were passing. I didn't count on the roadside post flitting by, but I kind of like the shot anyway because the train yard is clear and the blurry post gives a good sense of the vehicle in motion on the highway...

     




We ended up at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. It is no longer really a train terminal although Dave says there is actually one Amtrak train a day that stops on its way through for passengers to get on/off. Mostly it's—as the name implies—a museum center with permanent and short-term exhibits as well as an Omnimax theater.

There is also a room upstairs known as "Tower A" which is open to the public at certain times and where you can overlook the freight yard, talk to a train expert on hand, view train videos, buy train books/videos, and just generally soak up train history and info.

Here's a pic of Dave & Lana in front of Union Terminal, followed by a view lokking back over the fountain toward the Cincinnati skyline from in front of Union Terminal. Then there are four shots of the two large murals that you see immediately upon entering the front doors and moving into the main dome area...

     

     

     


Here are some views of the freight yard looking down from Tower A. The first shows a long train moving out of the yard and going around a bend to the left while another train can be seen coming towards the yard just to the right. The next one shows a closer view of the engines for the train that was coming in as it then passes through the yard in the other direction...

     

     


Last are some pics of an S-scale model train layout in another wing of the Museum Center. The layout depicts a back-in-the-day Cincinnati, with features such as a Procter & Gamble building, Crosley Field, former home of MLB's Cincinnati Reds (see here for a chronology of Reds' stadiums), and a model of Union Terminal itself. In one of the pics you can make out Crosley Field in the background behind a train yard and double-decker highway and the next one is a direct shot of Crosley field with the train yard and highway in the background...

     

     

     

     


Well, that's about it for my little Ohio excursion. I hope you enjoyed at least some of the pics, but I'll assume that if you're still reading to this point then you must have.

Here's a leftover shot I should have put in the previous post since it was from that last saturday and it's football related—nothing spectacular, just a view of the high school football field where some kids were either practicing or having some kind of pick-up game. I had to actually stick the lens of my camera through a chain link fence to get this shot, but it came out nice I think...




Finally, I should also publicly acknowledge and thank my cousin Dave and his wife Lana (plus their son Andrew and daughter Erin) for extending me their kind hospitality and making me feel so welcome, especially that last weekend at their home in Cincinnati. They also paid me well for my part in the work at the farm when quite honestly I would have been happy just to have my gas and toll expenses covered.

Besides monetary payment, Lana also gave me several bags full of clothes that had belonged to her Father who passed away last year. Apparently he and I were just about exactly the same size (at least since I lost sixty pounds or so about several years back anyway) and he had a lot of very nice clothes. I never expected such a surprise, but they've already come in quite handy. I'm wearing a couple of his outerware jackets all the time since my own had been looking kind of ragged. Knowing that the clothes belonged to her Father just makes the gesture all the more special.

So... Now I'll get back to mundane posts about whatever catches my fancy.