Columbus or Bust - Sunday

 

Sunday was going home day, so not too much to report, other than the journey. We had anticipated heading out to Baltimore this day, but rejigged things and used our Saturday more productively, and now all we had to do was pack and drive.

The Airbnb was a really nice little place to stay, a two-bedroomed family home in a good neighbourhood, on a quiet street. I’d guess it was built just before, or just after ,1920 and in it’s Dutch Barn style was good and solid. Some of the doors and windows looked original, and quite a lot of the internal wood most certainly was original. Downstairs, some modern wood flooring had been put down on the original surface, but the stairs and the upstairs floors were all thin boards and as squeaky as you like.

In the kitchen and dining area it was fitted out as any family home would be, with everything you’d expect to find in a modern kitchen. The front room wasn’t dominated by a TV because the owners had installed a ceiling mounted projector and a self-deploying screen. Add the good stereo speaker system and Apple TV and it was a very good home entertainment system. Not that we needed the facility, but we used it out of curiosity.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but the front door opened straight into the living room, although outside the door was under a copious porch area. Fine in the summer, and the storm door showed that, but for the winter, maybe not. The front porch was set up nicely to sit, it was north facing so shady, and the rear of the house had a nice deck with patio furniture and a couple of shade sails, which you’d need as that was south facing.

The neighbourhood of Clintonville is today quite trendy, with a fair bit of gentrification, especially towards the river. North High Street was booming, and the presence of niche restaurants and Pride flags gives you an idea of the local ambience. Indeed, the bulk of the area looked to be untouched by modern life, apart from the cars lining the streets, which is nice to see in a country where tearing down the old is a national sport.

Prior to departure, we did a quick dash down to the vegan bakery again, just to top up supplies you understand. Sunday traffic was light, so it was an easy run down North High Street and back. As quite large cities go, I have to say that Columbus is a very nice place to be.

Ready for the off, we loaded the car and headed northwest, towards Findlay and the I75. Trusting to Google Maps again, the lady in the device took us up alongside the Olentangy River for quite a distance, which was a nice drive on a Sunday morning. I had to stop for fuel and was once again slightly perplexed as to what happened to the requirement to add your Zip code to the gas pump in order to verify your credit card. Obviously, we don’t have a Zip code, us being Canadian and all, but there was a neat little workaround you could use. It took me a second, this time around, to realise that I’d put a PIN number in and that was the required verification. When we were taking the trailer on long runs in the USA, they were still using the magnetic strip on the credit card, not the chip as they do now. Perplexedness solved.

Google had us heading up to Upper Sandusky this time, on a multi-lane highway, which is how I thought we’d arrive on Friday. I think because Google finds the quickest route based on live traffic conditions, it must have decided that the construction works at Stratford would have delayed us too much so sent us down the smaller country roads through Kenton. Either way, progress was pretty good.

We stopped again at Bowling Green, on the northbound side this time of course, not too far north of Findlay and not too far south of Toledo. It was still scarily hot, and you don’t understand that until you get out of the air-conditioned car. Our snack lunch was taken quickly!

Toledo was negotiated, then were back in bumpy Michigan and pressing onto Detroit. As we approached, the sun was glinting off the new bridge, and I have to say that it looks even more impressive than in the (many) videos on YouTube. The bridge deck is one span now, but it’s not likely to be open for another year yet, which is a year too long in my book, especially as we were about to negotiate the Ambassador Bridge.

The Ambassador Bridge is ninety years old and has developed into the busiest land crossing in the US and Canada. Unfortunately, it has suffered from a chronic lack of investment because it’s privately owned. Betraying my socialist leanings, I can’t help thinking that its lack of development, and even basic maintenance, has suffered in the name of profit. It also predates all the main highways, so at both ends, traffic is dumped straight into either Windsor or Detroit, and not on a nice, speedy highway. The new bridge isn’t privately owned (phew!), and doesn’t shy away from highways, with Ontario’s Highway 401 being extended right to the bridge on the Canadian side, and a new connection with Michigan’s I75 being constructed on the US side. The future looks bright, but for now we’re stuck with the old bridge. Remember I was talking about Chip and PIN credit cards? Well, the Ambassador Bridge still uses the magnetic strip technology, which is slow and awkward – see, no investment.

Twisting roads get you up on the bridge, and then drops you down onto Windsor’s Huron Church Road. But not before the Border Service people have had a squint at your passport. Normally, crossing back into Canada is quite easy, and there are rarely queues. Unfortunately, on this Sunday, there were lines a plenty, so it was on with the patient heads. Once at the kiosk, the young woman was polite, professional and friendly. I handed her the passports all open to the right page, then made sure all the car windows were open so that she could see inside, which are two simple things you can do to make transit much easier. She’d taken her time with a few of the cars ahead of us, but we breezed through and I’m fairly sure that my little tricks to ease the way went some way to helping.

Then it was Huron Church Road. Three lanes either side, with a built median and lots of Stop lights. It pays to not get stuck behind trucks because they tend to move off from the lights slowly, but this day the centre lane was full of trucks and the right lane was full of people dithering about whether they wanted Tim Hortons or McDonalds. Once they’re moving, those big rigs really move, and it’s a 60kph limit there. I’m doing early 80 and I’m being harassed by one truck behind me because he wants to go faster, so he dives into the right lane and starts a passing move on me. He gets about two thirds of the way past then realizes there’s a slow vehicle in his lane, so on goes his blinker and he starts to move into my lane. Ordinarily I can’t be bothered to fight these idiots and I just move out of their way. Today though, two things made me hold my ground. Firstly, diving to the right to pass is a moving violation, and that’s on top of the speeding. Secondly, I needed one of the two right lanes to make the turn to the 401 a few yards ahead, and I wasn’t going to be pushed out of lane to miss my turn because of a twat like that. So, I stayed where I was. His blinker kept going but he wasn’t going to side swipe me, and I wasn’t going to be intimidated. I won that one because he did back off. On the 401 itself, 100kph limit, he comes flying past me on my left (better), but he’s both speeding and occupying the left lane, which is also a moving violation for a truck of that size. Of course, out on the main part of the highway where the limit is higher, I breezed past him and went on my way. Indeed, I could have backed off at the point he was trying to force his way past and still have been ahead of him, but I’m damned if I’m going to let a jackass like that intimidate me. Of course, I would have yielded to avoid a collision, but while I felt confident that I was OK, then I was going to stick to my right of way. We did take a photo of his licence plate, but I doubt I will get around to reporting him. Had I had a dashcam then maybe I would have.

After that bit of excitement, it was a clear run home. Five hours in total (stops and border had added an hour) and a total distance over the weekend a few kilometres short of 900. I only started feeling a bit drowsy in the last ten kilometres, which was pretty good, too.

The football was an experience, even if the result wasn’t, and the visit to Basil was excellent. Columbus is a great city, and our house for the weekend was lovely. Now, if we could just get Michigan to fix its roads…

 

Columbus or Bust - Saturday

Saturday dawned, and with it the prospect of trying out yet another different type of shower system in the house. This one turned out not to require too much advanced knowledge, with two controls rather than one. Shower designers must fall over themselves to build ever more complex setups, usually in the guise of reducing the manufacturing cost, so every shower I have to interface with in hotels or Airbnb places is a bit of a challenge. But then that’s just me.

 

Our first port of call for the day was the “Happy Little Treats” bakery, purveyor of fine vegan things, which was about ten minutes away. Without going into too much detail, we emerged with a big box of baked goodies, and looked set for the day. 

 

Then we headed south to the rural idyll that is Baltimore, Ohio. There lie the earthly remains of a distant relative of mine, one William Franklin Mayne, and his wife Eliza Jane. He was the third born son of Henry Mayne, who left Leeds (my home town) in the UK in 1822, and set off for the New World. He started quite a dynasty on this side of the Atlantic, of which old WF was at the vanguard. The drive down was only about forty minutes, and while the land was a bit more undulating thereabouts, the fields were full of corn and beans, and the houses looked much the same as in southern Ontario. Nearer Baltimore, the houses were bigger and generally set in more land, which I supposed denoted the presence of money, although this was still all in the middle of miles and miles of fields. As we drove along the arrow straight roads lined with electricity poles, I couldn't help thinking of the scenes in the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? when a caravan of Airstream trailers rolled down such a road. I guess the road could have been anywhere in the Midwest.

 

Baltimore was just a nice little town servicing the surrounding rural area. Old WF and his family had lived in the village, known as Basil originally, but had been absorbed by its bigger neighbour, Baltimore. Today, though, it was the Old Basil Cemetery we were visiting. I should point out here for the Brits reading this that Basil is pronounced “Bay-zil” on this side of the pond; I mention that just for authenticity of course. One of Basil’s claims was that it was a stopping point on the long-defunct Ohio and Erie Canal, which was the source of its early prosperity, but of course you all knew that already.

 

Old WF had been the village doctor in the second half of the Nineteenth century, and a property developer as well, given that he owned much of the land Basil (sorry, West Baltimore) now stands on. The word “owned” is a misnomer because the land would have been appropriated from the native people that had lived here for thousands of years before European contact. Indian removal had started after the Revolutionary War, about a hundred years before WF acquired the title, and was likely either Shawnee or Wyandot land. In any talk of North America, it’s important to acknowledge these facts.

 

When we arrived in West Market Street, there was a parade underway, so clearly someone had told them I was coming. It was a wee bit bizarre to be browsing the cemetery while there were people dressed up like ice cream cones, or riding multi-seated quad-cycles, just a few yards away. Anyway, we found WF’s grave fairly easily, revelled in the general aura of Mayneness, and took some photos.

On the way back to the car, we looked carefully at a house that I thought had been built by WF but re-reading the entry in the Baltimore Community Museum Facebook page, it was a newer house we were looking at, but on the site of WF’s original dwelling. Still, it was a significant space for me.

 

Then it was back to the big city of Columbus. We’d been there before a few years ago and had remarked how clean and tidy the downtown core was. While not actually downtown now, we did get a good view of it from the highway, perched as it is on a little rise, and very nice it looked too. 

 

Back at the house, we chilled a little (essential given how warm it was getting outside), and prepared for the main event of the weekend, the match between Chelsea Football Club of London, and Manchester City FC of, well, Manchester. Both English Premier League teams were in the USA on a pre-season tour, and they were booked to play each other at the Ohio State Stadium. That’s not a soccer stadium, but as it seats 102,000, it was better for the money men than using the much smaller Columbus Crew MLS soccer stadium. When I said it was getting warmer, it was also getting darker, which was of course a prelude to a huge rain storm. It was not looking good because the Ohio stadium doesn’t have any cover over its seats. Fortunately, the storm passed quickly, but then the heat started to build, so it looked like we’d likely drown, or boil while watching the game.

 

The wise decision was taken to utilize an Uber rideshare car to get us to the stadium, and young Hassan, our driver, sped us into the huge campus that is Ohio State University. We were still some way from the stadium as we passed parking lots with spaces at $20, which made the Uber decision make real sense. When we were dropped close to the stadium, a bar, The Varsity, was full of Chelsea supporters singing and shouting, and it was more than reminiscent of the Fulham Road on Saturday afternoon than a hot afternoon in Ohio. As we approached the ground, there were many thousands of Chelsea and City shirts in evidence, plus a whole raft of other football shirts, from El Salvador to Arsenal.

Completed in 1922, the stadium is a horseshoe shaped concrete edifice that these days can hold 102,000 paying customers. It’s normally the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes football team but is often used for University events as well. If nothing else, it’s impressive. The downside was that the playing area isn’t really built for soccer, so the pitch laid out was a little narrow, and probably short as well, but from our seats up in the nosebleed section, it was difficult to tell. I have mentioned already that there is no covering over any of the stadium, so if it was going to rain then we were going to get soaked. As it turned out, it stayed dry, but the ambient air temperature that afternoon was around 30C, and when the sun shone, it was seriously hot up there on the concrete cliff face.

 

The facilities in the stadium were OK, plenty of water to be bought, and beer, and hotdogs, at a price of course. The men’s toilets on C deck were pretty awful, but that was down to the users, not the providers. There was some merchandise being sold, but the people behind us took about thirty minutes and $200 to come back with not very much at all, so that was pretty much what we expected. 

 

The pre-game stuff was all US professional sports nonsense. Mascots, crowd-cam, stupid games and a “host” trying to get everyone warmed up. The sound system was pretty good, and the DJ providing the music wasn’t bad, but it just went on too long. The giant screen at one end of the stadium was a mass of flashing images and, this being the USA, non-stop commercials.

 

When the game started, at least the music was stopped, although the people behind us did ask, out loud, why that was. They thought the music might liven things up a bit. The game wasn’t great, pre-season friendlies never are, even though things had been built up like it was a cup final or something. The referee, surely FIFA accredited, was dreadful, dishing out a penalty when City’s captain fell over in the penalty area, then handing out yellow cards for even the mildest contact between players. That didn’t help. Nor did my team being beaten 4-2. I couldn’t quite deal with the music and flashing screens when goals were scored, a camera operator rushing onto the pitch to record the players’ celebrations was a bit mad, and every corner kick was greeted with a commercial “This corner kick is brought to you by Rinky-Dinky Airlines”. That’s just not done in European football. Still, it was only a practice match, so what did it matter?

 

The 72,000 paying customers in the ground seemed to enjoy the spectacle, and I’m glad we went, because it was quite the event. One day the Premier League should organize a competitive game in the US, without all the music and the lights, and held in a stadium with a roof on, at least over the spectators. Then you’d get the crowd noise and not be distracted by Rinky-Dink Airlines every few minutes.

 

Coming out of the stadium was OK, it’s a big place and didn’t feel too crushed as everyone made for the exits. I thought it looked and felt a bit like the old Wembley Stadium in London as we headed out down the stairs but given that the Ohio stadium was built at around the same time, it shouldn’t have been surprising. We needed to walk a bit to get away from ground and the main bulk of spectators, and even when we did and bagged another Uber car, the traffic was still horrible. Mind you, the driver was pretty good with the back streets and had us home in record time.

 

It was too late to go out for dinner at that point, not least because a lot of places close at 9pm (this isn’t Europe, for sure, where places don’t even open until 9pm), so it was pizza and beer at home, along with a cheesy but moral Tom Hanks movie on the big screen.

 

Goodness that was a busy day.

 

Columbus or Bust Weekend - Friday

Not an Airstream trip, but travel all the same, so here goes.

 

Our favourite English football (soccer) team was on a tour of North America, as a warm up to the 2024/25 Premier League season. It was their penultimate game, and it was in Columbus, Ohio, just four hours’ drive to the south of us. Well, we couldn’t not go. Four hours, when you write it down, seems quite a long drive, but in North American terms, that’s local when you consider people will drive for days to cross this continent.

 

We left young William to organise the tickets, the scarily expensive tickets, and for good measure he set up a nice little Airbnb place for us for the weekend. All was set for our Friday departure, or at least it was when I’d taken Charlie’s car seat out of the minivan, and then vacuumed the collected detritus from underneath it, which included crisps, Skittles, and a whole host of identified crumbs and fluff. In a fit of excitement, I also went out and had a haircut, topped off the minivan’s fuel tank, and ran it through the car wash. What a morning.

 

Finally on the road, it was a clear and easy run down to Windsor, but the weather tried its best to spoil the party. It was very warm, and the clouds were building, so rain was surely due, and it was rain that we duly experienced. Rain so hard that the visibility on the highway was almost down to nothing at some points. This was where it became interesting. Obviously when the weather does that, you slow right down and make sure you have a good gap between you and the other vehicles on the road. Headlights are also required, but that was the first issue. Most cars here have daylight running lamps, that is headlights that are on all the time, as are the dash lights, but not the rear lights. So a good half of the cars on the highway were still on daylight running and showing no rear lights, which is a bit of a bummer in bad visibility conditions. Some did put their four-way flashers on, technically not legal but I get the idea, but rear lights would have been far better. Then people started pulling over onto the shoulder and stopping. I was gobsmacked. If you’re concerned about safety, the last thing you need to do is to stop and present a stationary barrier should anyone veer slightly off of the road in the bad weather. The good Mrs M said it was a regular occurrence in heavy rain, though I’d never seen it before, but it just seemed counter to safety. I’ve never seen anyone do that in snow, or fog, so why rain? Anyway, we had three or four more serious bouts of rain before we ran out of highway and plodded along Windsor’s Huron Church Road towards the Ambassador Bridge and the United States of America, but that was more than enough.

 

Border crossings can be fraught, and sometimes very slow, but today it wasn’t too bad despite it being the Friday of a Canadian long weekend. The fellow in the border kiosk was suitably grumpy, but asked only the regular questions about destination, reasons and length of stay. He threw in a question about the relationships of the people in the vehicle, because there were two surnames, not one, but that was the extent of the grilling. In the rain, we threaded our way out of the border complex and onto the I75 and headed south.

 

People who travel a lot will tell you that Michigan’s roads are not the best, and they’re not wrong. The concrete roads are ridged and pitted and you fairly bounce down the road towards Ohio. There were some major roadworks around the new bridge in Detroit, and again just before arriving in Ohio, but that whole forty-seven miles or so from the bridge to the Ohio State Line is just horrible, which is not great given that it’s an Interstate Highway. Ohio seems to look after their roads a bit better, and the going was easier around Toledo. We broke the run at a Rest Stop in Bowling Green (Who can forget the great Bowling Green Massacre? Google it). Ontario doesn’t have these rest stops, it only has Service Centres. Like the ones we used in mid-Michigan earlier in the year, this one was small but had parking enough for cars and for trucks, clean toilets and a couple of vending machines. No fast food, no overpriced sandwiches, and no scarily expensive fuel. I like these Rest Stops. It’s a thing here that if you need fuel and fast food then you come right off the highway into one of the many Truck Stops, or even just into a small town beside the road; it’s all signposted most comprehensively. If I remember correctly, while Ontario has adopted the British-style Service Centres, Quebec has the American-style Rest Stops. Indeed, thinking about Quebec, France’s Autoroutes have Rest Stops, or Aires. Goodness, how well travelled I am (not).

 

While at the Rest Stop, we were approached by an older gentleman who said “Where are we?”. I was torn between thinking this was a poor old fellow who’d lost his marbles, or imagining that he was an ageing drug addict. Fortunately he qualified his question by saying “On the map”, and gestured to a large road map on the wall. I was relieved for both of us. The map didn’t have a little “You Are Here” marker on it, not even a load of greasy finger marks on account of it being mounted quite high on the wall, away from children. We pointed out to the old fellow where we were, and both he and his wife looked much happier and showed us where they were heading, which was nice.

 

Back on the I75, just past Findlay, we struck off the Interstate into the country on a normal one lane each way road and headed towards Columbus, passing though some nice little towns along the way. Americans do like their flags, and so many houses have at least one on proud display. I asked an American friend once about that flag-dependence, and she said that perhaps it was because the USA is such a young country and they feel they need to establish a national identity. Given the melting pot of people here, that is most likely true. I remember being quite surprised as a kid to see a Union flag at all in the UK, and that elusive English flag, the cross of St.George, seemed only to be flown on High Days and Holidays. One thing we all remarked on was that apart from the flags, it was hard to tell the difference between Ontario and Ohio as the fields and buildings all looked pretty much the same.

 

Nearing Columbus we were back on multi-lane roads, and some quite scary driving from the natives. A dump truck joined the highway from an onramp and shot across three lanes to drive in one of the left-hand lanes, for no reason I could see. A little later, I moved right onto an offramp and a woman in a little blue Hyundai went to use the shoulder to pass me on the right before thinking better of it. Once on the next bit of multi-lane road, she went flying out to the left lane in one fell swoop. The irony of all that was that we caught up with her as we headed into the northern suburbs of the city and followed her for a while. Oh, the pointlessness of it all.

 

Google Maps Directions wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t send you down at least a couple of odd roads when it didn’t need to. We ended up traversing a couple of long brick roads; cobbled, but with bricks. It reminded me of the original Indianapolis Speedway, which was adroitly termed “The Brickyard” because the first track was made up of old bricks. I don’t think these roads were ever designed for the use they get, so the surface was dipped and lumpy as the bricks had sunk unevenly. Still, it does tend to slow you down a bit, which is good for safety, of course.

 

Our home for the next couple of days was part way down a long, tree-lined street, not bricked, thankfully. As I was working out where to park on the street, another car came right behind me, and, as I moved in, she moved in just in front of me and threw her car in reverse. Oops, I thought, she’s going to be upset that I took her space. She wasn’t of course, she was parking as well and It was just coincidence that she came in right behind me when she did. Strange things happen, sometimes.

 

The house was very nice, 1910s or 1920s at a guess, Dutch Barn shaped and full of wood features, like some great heavy window frames, internal French Doors and a great wooden staircase. Oh, and ludicrously squeaky floors. I’ll do a bit more about the house in another blog entry.

 

Having settled in, we walked up onto North High Street and down a ways to The Lavash Cafe, a Mediterranean food specialist which did some excellent vegan and non-vegan dishes. It was very busy, but with great service, and we filled our faces. They clearly rely on a fast turn around of customers because tables were being filled, then emptied, in record time, or so it seemed to me. Then it was next door to the noisy but quite enjoyable Combustion Brewery and Tap Room for a beer. My IPA was some thick, yellow-tinged stuff that looked like muddy water, but tasted reasonably good. Try as I might, I can’t get my head around unfiltered beer, I guess it’s years of conditioning. Not cask conditioning, either. Our final stop for the night was the Bottle Store for some take out booze. There was a bewildering choice, but I did manage to select a relatively local beer that I could see through, and at a reasonable price.

 

Back at base, once we’d worked out how to use Apple+ TV, the projector on the ceiling and the screen that deployed itself from a cylinder on the wall, we watched the movie Eurovision. Poor Iceland, I don’t know what you did to deserve that level of mockery.

 

Before bed, we hashed out a plan for the next day, given that the footy wasn’t until late afternoon, and we moved our visit to the dead relatives’ grave from Sunday to Saturday, and threw in a visit to a place that sells vegan donuts. Weather permitting, it looked good for the morrow.