Author Archives: Denny

Route 66 Miles of Possibility 2023

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As my schedule got increasingly messy, I let this event slide out of consideration. It again caught my eye when organizers announced an extension of the early-bird cut off and I realized that I could fit it in. So I’m off to the only annual conference dedicated to Historic Route 66. This is the eighth year for the conference, my fourth time attending, and the first time I’ve made it to two in a row. The conference actually starts Thursday morning but there was an associated concert on Wednesday and I planned the staging drive to include a major new attraction on the route. The first day of the journal is now in place.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

400 Breweries

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I was mildly surprised when I hit 300 breweries but not so 400. I knew exactly when number 400 was on the horizon and just hoped it would be someplace cool. It was. Just like the place that surprised me in 2021 (Millstone Pizza and Brewery), there was food and good beer. The two even shared being recommended by friends although in the latest case, the friends were just a day old. The 400th brewery got some extra love from me by being one of those small operations that sit out in the country with lots of open space around them and some outside seating.

The first picture shows the front of Creekside Brewing Company but the entrance is around back. Just follow the bicycles. Pictures also show some of that open space and good food I mentioned. That’s an Afternoon Joe Porter behind the pulled pork. I was surprised by those new friends who recommended this brewery sitting at a nearby table. I’d met them the night before at another brewery and again earlier in the day at an airport open house which is where they recommended Creekside. That other brewery, Swing On Brewery (#399 9/20/23), was even more “out in the country”, had good beer and open space, and would have made a fine #400. I did get a picture. I also got a picture of Creekside’s tap area and its delightful owners, Rashaell and Eric.

When I did the post on reaching 300 Breweries, I included the start of the next 100 at Cowboy State Brewing, and I’ll do the same now. Sequatchie Valley Brewing Company was nearly as difficult to find as CSB had been. The only sign was the small hanging one in the picture and I drove by multiple times and double-checked the address before seeing it. There were only two SVBC beers on tap along with a hard lemonade and some beer from other breweries. I failed to read the fine print about the Märzen before I tried it and was surprised by the “touch of pumpkin spice”. I was kind of put off by it, too. The cream ale was better.

Breweries in this last one hundred I thought worthy of note include Studebaker Brewing Company (#308 7/11/21),  Scratch Brewing Company (#336 6/5/22), Sangamo Brewing (#350 10/23/22),  Wooly Pig Farm Brewery (#363 4/6/23), and Old Bridge Brewing Company (#389 9/10/23). Studebaker is in South Bend, IN, where it shares the former Clement Studebaker Mansion with the Tippecanoe Place Restaurant. Scratch, near Ava, IL, was recommended by a friend some time ago but it took me a while to get there. The rural establishment ticked all of my cool brewery boxes. I liked Sangamo in Chatham, IL, because it’s a combination brewery, restaurant, and sign museum.

Wooly Pig Farm was also recommended by a friend and also matched my cool brewery profile. The brewery shares the farm near Fresno, OH, with Mangalica pigs which are indeed wooly. Finding Old Bridge in McConnelsville, OH, was pretty much a stroke of luck. The 1919 Chevrolet garage is a great place for a brewery.

As I explained at the time, my surprise at hitting my 300th brewery when I did was partially due to Untappd, where I do my logging, recognizing some breweries that had not been classified as such when I logged them. That practice continues meaning that a brewery’s position on my list can change. The brewery that triggered the 200 Breweries post is now #204 and the one that triggered the 300 Breweries post is now #303. That means that I actually reached those landmarks a little earlier than announced and that it took me only 97 breweries to go from 300 to 400. Perhaps a little warping of statistics is to be expected when breweries are involved. The positions given above for breweries are based on the current list. Positions given in previous posts were accurate at the time of posting.

In reporting my 200th brewery, I wrote about a place that had definitely been a brewery when I visited in 2015 but was not identified as one by Untappd at the time. Now, as I looked into the minor shifts in my brewery list, I discovered that my check-in of Pinups and Pints, a brewery, had been replaced with a check-in of Baby Dolls, a strip club. Although I believe Untappd got the timing of the name change and classification wrong, I decided that the easiest way to get credit for a check-in at “The World’s Only Strip Club — Brew Pub” was to do it again. This time the house-brewed beer (There is only one at a time.) was Pin Up Pale Ale.  

Sorting through the various check-ins and list positions got me thinking about pace. I joined Untappd on January 29, 2014, and logged my first brewery two days later on January 31. The 100th was logged 999 days later on October 26, 2016. The 200th was logged on June 29, 2019, and the 300th on July 2, 2021. The 400th was logged on September 30, 2023. That’s 976, 734, and 820 days for the last three groups of 100 or 3529 days for all 400. The pace has varied some but not dramatically. The overall average is a new brewery every 8.8 days (roughly 0.79 breweries a week) during a period approaching ten years. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.

Trades, Taverns, and Tippling

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I have been visiting Vevay, Indiana, on a fairly regular basis since just before the turn of the century but Saturday was my first time at Musée de Venoge on the town’s west edge. The two-story early nineteenth-century house on the property was restored and opened to the public in 2011. Major living history events are held three times a year. One celebrates the 4th of July and another celebrates Christmas. The third celebrates the fall harvest in October. This year that event carried the title Trades, Taverns, and Tippling.

Trades displayed on the grounds included rope making and pewter casting. Today Kyle Willyard was casting spoons.

A blacksmith (Michael Shult) was working on an oven rake to help with the cooking while a carpenter (Tom Garrett) worked on what he called a school box.

The gunsmith (Michael McHugh) demonstrated a fire starter of the day. It uses the same mechanism as a flintlock rifle with tinder and a candle instead of a barrel and bullet. Several beautiful rifles he had made were on a table beside him.

Cooking, decorative painting, and weaving were also being demonstrated.

The restored house was turned into the Eagle Tavern for the day and that’s where the tippling occurred. Kentuckians Brian Cushing and Amy Liebert served as tavern keepers.

There was also music in the tavern and a lawyer hoped for new clients as he worked on a local murder case. It was the gentleman seated in the corner who suggested I try the Orange Shrub which I found delicious. He was, I presume, demonstrating tippling.

The weather was perfect with temperatures low enough to fit the season but not so low as to be uncomfortable. And the mix of bright blue sky and clouds made the day look exactly like it felt.

Trip Peek #125
Trip #155
SCA Conference 2019

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This picture is from my trip to the 2019 Society for Commercial Archeology conference. The conference title was “Wacky in Wisconsin” and this picture is of one of the wackiest things we saw. It’s the Forevertron at The World of Dr. Evermor. The conference had kicked off the preceding evening with a boat cruise through Wisconsin Dells. The Forevertron was seen on a bus tour that took in several of the area’s wacky places and included an abbreviated visit to House on the Rock. A second bus tour took us into Milwaulkee for more wackiness. A day of presentations separated the two tours.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

US 127

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US-127 is the shortest of the two United States Numbered Highways that pass through the county of my birth. It has naturally been on my list of roads to drive but it has been pretty low on the list and hasn’t received a lot of attention. That changed a little bit last year when I realized that its southern terminus is quite close to one of my favorite breakfast spots. It got another boost, and a date to hang a trip on when I learned of an opportunity to scratch off another list item while traveling the route. So I left home Tuesday morning and headed toward the northern terminus of US-127. I actually reached it and will begin driving the trip’s namesake highway in the morning. Even though today was really just getting ready to start, I did take some pictures and put together a journal page.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

Walking With Amal to Cincy

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Little Amal had already covered a lot of ground and water before she reached the midpoint of the John A. Roebling Bridge on Friday afternoon. The twelve-foot-tall puppet representing a ten-year-old Syrian refugee began her trek in Turkey in July 2021. Much of her travels have been in Europe where she walked in Germany, Italy, France, Ukraine, Poland, and many other countries. She has also walked in Canada and this is not her first time in the U.S. She was in New York City for seventeen days in 2022.

This time though, she will be walking across the entire country. The picture at left is a capture from a live feed of her first night in Boston where a pre-recorded message and lullaby from Yo-Yo Ma offered some comfort. That was on September 7. Cincinnati is just one of the forty cities she will stop in as she travels some 6,000 miles through the country before wrapping up the visit in San Diego on November 5. Check out her plans here.

Friday’s walk started on the south side of the Ohio River in Covington, Kentucky. A bit of rustling in the crowd gathered at the entrance to the Roebling Bridge alerted me to Amal’s arrival, and I caught my first glimpse of her just a few minutes past 3:00. The Ciara Harper Trio and Revolution Dance Theatre began a wonderful performance of Wade in the Water (great harmonies!) as Amal worked her way forward. By the time the song ended, she had joined the singers.

The two puppeteers handling Amal’s arms can be seen in this picture of her starting across the bridge. Some zooming, tweaking, and general mucking about allows the person responsible for Amal’s walking to be seen vaguely here. Most puppeteers are not athletes by any stretch of the imagination but this one is. For sure. Indubitably.

As she made her way over the bridge, Amal frequently paused to interact with the people greeting her. Near the Ohio side of the river, she pets one of Cincinnati’s flying — or maybe just dancing — pigs.

Keeping her pathway clear was at least partially successful and Amal does make it over the river. She takes another whiff of the giant flowers that have followed her from Kentucky as she exits the bridge and heads toward her designated spot.

Reaching that spot, where the mayors of both Covington and Cincinnati awaited, took a while and when she got there all I could see was her head above the crowd. I couldn’t actually hear everything either but I did hear most of what Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval had to say. This was not his first time meeting Amal. They had met last October when Pureval was in Amsterdam for a Mayor’s Conference and Amal was doing a walk in the city that included Anne Frank’s house.

Pureval has some very personal reasons for caring about the world’s refugees that Amal is walking on behalf of. He was born in Ohio but his parents were immigrants. His father was born in India. His mother was born in Tibet. Her parents had been forced to flee Tibet with her and she grew up in India — as a refugee.

Donate to the Amal Fund here.

Play Review
What the Constitution Means to Me
Ensemble Theater

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Some plays you watch. Some plays you experience. This one’s in the latter group. Heidi Schreck wrote the play which is rooted in her own life. She also starred in the play — as herself — in multiple productions including a nearly six-month run on Broadway in 2019. What the Constitution Means to Me has been nominated for a bunch of awards and has won several. It was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I knew none of this when I first saw an announcement for the production at Cincinnati’s Ensemble Theater.

Schreck is not part of the Cincinnati cast. Here Heidi is a character played by Connan Morrissey. There is no intermission or numbered acts but the play rather naturally divides itself into three portions. As a teenager, the real Heidi earned college money by entering and winning US Constitution-based speaking contests sponsored by the American Legion. The play’s first portion depicts that period with Heidi, the character, frequently breaking the fourth wall and the rules of the contest to speak directly to the audience. It starts when she first steps onto the stage, describes the contest setting, and asks everyone in the audience to pretend to be an old white cis-gendered male.

A Legionnaire, played by Phil Fiorini, keeps time and generally facilitates things as Heidi, the character, repeatedly sidesteps the contest to share family history and personal thoughts with the audience. Eventually, the pretend speaking contest is completely abandoned, and Heidi, the character, proceeds to share her thoughts directly from center stage. Those thoughts include how the Constitution has failed women, Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants, and others. She points not only to the words of the Constitution but to how this document written by old white men has been interpreted by what until recently was just another group of old white men. Playing a few recordings of Supreme Court discussions provides some all-too-serious laughs.

Freed of his Legionnaire duties, Fiorini moves on to portray Mike, another character/real person. Mike Iveson originated the role which, like the real Heidi being embodied in the character Heidi, brings forward some of the real Mike’s experiences with masculinity and homophobia. This naturally provides opportunities for pointing out how the Constitution has failed another big group of citizens but the real Mike and the real Heidi both see the role as something more. Schreck refers to “positive male energy”. Iveson talks about “modeling what it looks like when a man actually listens to a woman”. I read those comments only after seeing the play but they instantly made sense.

The play’s third phase begins when a third cast member is introduced. Twenty-one-year-old Sydni Charity Solomon plays herself in a debate on the proposition that the US Constitution should be rewritten by a more diverse group for a more diverse world. Cheering and booing by the audience is very much encouraged at this point and everyone is given a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution for reference. At debate’s end, an audience member is selected to determine the winner. It is my understanding that sides in the debate are determined each night by a coin flip and that the actual arguments may be different from one night to the next. On Thursday night, Heidi defended the proposition while Sydni attacked it. The selected audience member declared Sydni the winner meaning the Constitution should be kept and fixed rather than discarded and completely done over.

One of the performances with Heidi Schreck and Mike Iveson has been recorded and is available for streaming through Amazon Prime. I’m sure it’s good and seeing the real Mike and the real Heidi is certainly attractive though not so much as to get me to subscribe. If you have Prime and want to watch it, by all means, go ahead. It is true, though, that watching a movie is not the same as watching a play, and watching a play is not the same as experiencing a play. The intimate Ensemble Theater is a good place to experience What the Constitution Means to Me. It’s there through October 1.

A Big WACO Birthday

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It was one hundred years ago that the Weaver Aircraft Company moved to Troy, Ohio, and became Advance Aircraft Company. The company’s origins were in 1919 and some name changes had already occurred. One more was yet to come. The planes the company built were always known by the Weaver-based acronym WACO and in 1929 the company formally became the Waco Aircraft Company. The company no longer exists but its memory is kept alive at the WACO Museum and Airfield

I have attended the annual WACO Fly-In a few times including last year. My first visit was in 2006 and I also documented a visit in 2014. This year’s event was much bigger than any of those. The normally ample parking near the museum was filled long before we got there. We parked in an area on the other side of the airfield and rode a shuttle back.

Organizers had hoped to attract 100 WACOs for this 100th anniversary. I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen but there were certainly a lot more there than the twenty or less I’ve seen in the past. I estimated there were 50 to 60 WACOs on the ground. Unlike in previous years, the main airplane parking area was reserved exclusively for WACOs with all other planes relegated to the far side of the airstrip.

In a conversation with another attendee, I learned that this plane was one that I used to watch from the banks of the Little Miami River as it flew over Kings Island in a daily air show. This was in the 1970s when the name WACO would not have meant much to me.

WACOs are beautiful machines whether they are on the ground…

…or in the air…
 
 
 
 
…or somewhere in between.
 
 
 
Heck. Even the naked engines can be kind of pretty.

To close, here’s a look at a WACO from every angle: WACO Pirouette 

Ohio River Sternwheel Festival

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For the forty-seventh time, a bunch of sternwheelers gathered to party in Marietta, Ohio, and, for the first time, I was there. Motel and hotel rooms in Marietta are pretty much filled by Ohio River Sternwheel Festival attendees but I found a very reasonably priced room less than twenty miles away in Mineral Wells, West Virginia. Even after a very leisurely drive on US-50, I arrived in plenty of time to head to Marietta for the festival’s opening ceremonies.

There were some short speeches and some long and sincere thank yous, the national anthem with a giant flag overhead, and a flyover by a Navy jet. Things officially went live with the lighting of the festival torch.

A full evening of entertainment followed with a Tina Turner tribute to finish out the day. Despite knowing that “big wheel keep on turning” would sound extra special tonight, I headed to my motel to rest up for a full day on Saturday. I did stay long enough to hear several tunes from Steve and Beverly Pottmeyer and a friend. Steve performed at the very first Sternwheel Festival in 1976 and has only missed performing at one since then.

I made it back Saturday in time to catch the first musical performers. The Marietta High School Wall of Sound wouldn’t fit on the stage so they formed their wall on the river bank. The Marietta High School Choir – Vocal Point did fit on the stage. The place where I parked yesterday was operated by the choir. The Bruce Hass Trio was up next with, as far as I know, no high schoolers.

Between checking out the musical acts, I walked the line of boats pulled up to the shore. I counted thirty although I could detect no wheels on the sterns of two of those I counted.

I had noticed a large sternwheeler passing by yesterday and again today. Thinking it might be offering cruises, I zoomed in on its name and turned to the web. Sure enough, the Valley Gem was offering one-hour cruises and there was one remaining before the sold-out fireworks cruise. I reserved a spot on that cruise then turned to Google Maps for directions. I knew the dock would be some distance up the Muskingum River but it was a little farther than I would have guessed. My estimated arrival time for the 2:45 cruise was 2:46.

Although I was one of the last to board, I made it. I could now see the wheels on all those sterns. Note the kayakers in that picture with the Lafayette Hotel in the background, and take a look at some of the onshore crowd in the third picture. The cruise also provided a pretty good look at the fireworks barge.

My return to the festival area was a lot more relaxed than my hurried walk to the Valley Gem had been. I tried out a couple of benches along the way then stopped at the Marietta Brewing Company for a brew and dinner. Even so, a couple of hours remained until fireworks time and the ever-increasing crowd reminded me of why I mostly avoid events such as this. I probably would have left if I had not been parked in.

So I stayed and enjoyed a very good, nearly half-hour long, fireworks display. This is a festival highlight that locals mention a lot and it’s easy to see why.

Getting through the ensuing traffic jam was every bit the nightmare I anticipated. I don’t think I learned a whole lot about fireworks-related traffic jams that I didn’t already know but I still feel I deserve a few continuing education credits.

Lunken Airport Days 2023

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As I imagine the case is everywhere, Labor Day weekend is pretty crowded with activities around here. I picked Lunken Airport Days to fill my Saturday primarily because I had never attended before. It was also the closest of the events I considered and was the only one that was free. Lunken (LUK) opened in the 1920s and was Cincinnati’s principal airport until Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) opened in 1947.

Airport Days is hosted by Cincinnati War Birds so basically features military aircraft. Several classic cars are on display and there are even a few civilian airplanes such as this 1940 WACO. The 100th anniversary of WACO Aircraft Company will be celebrated leter this month at the museum and field in Troy, Ohio.

Military planes included a 1942 BT-13A VULTEE, the next to last B-25 ever built, and a 1944 P-51D Mustang. Seated in the foreground of the Mustang phot is one of the local artists participating in an informal “Lunken Days Sketch Outing”.

But the biggest plane on campus — actually one of the biggest planes ever built — was the B-29 Superfortress named Doc. 1644 Superfortresses were built during World War II. Only two are flying today. This remarkable airplane has its own website here.

My attention focused entirely on Doc when I heard that first engine begin to turn. That initial bit of smoke was soon gone and soon all four engines were running smoothly. Doc earns his keep by taking paying passengers aloft Some of this flight’s passengers can be seen here and here as the plane taxies.

After taxieing to the far end of the field, Doc rumbles down the runway, lifts off, and disappears behind one of the airport buildings. Because of the surrounding trees and the plane’s low flight path, I don’t get a shot of the plane in flight until it returns and circles the field.

It is headed south, just as it was on takeoff, when it returns to the runway.

There was just enough time after the flight landed to prepare for the presentation of the flag and singing of the national anthem at noon. I was not able to photograph the color guard as they marched toward the plane but I caught them on the way back.

Although we could see everything the guide pointed out, there wasn’t much room in the cockpit for taking pictures. The tunnel to the rear of the airplane went unused as entry and exit were via vertical ladders.

I could now get closeups of the nose art and bombardier’s position. With plexiglass domes in place of gun ports, I could look right through the plane to the historic terminal.

Airport Days is a two day affair so, if you are seeing this shortly after publication, you can easily catch the second half. The weather looks to be just as delightful today as it was yesterday.