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.