Beautiful desolation

Scenes from our little trip down into O-haaaa-o last Sunday. I say O-haaaa-o with great affection. I think that Ohio gets kind of a bad rap. It’s true that if you are trying to get down the I75 Snowbird Geezerway to Crazy Old Florida (which we are planning to do in April), all kinds of awful stuff can happen in Ohio, mainly construction issues that can tie up traffic forever.

But there are also places like Kelleys Island and I will never forget a trip Liz and I took with friends more years ago than I am strong enough to count, to look at colleges in Ohio, Kenyon and Wooster in particular. Beautiful driving through beautiful rolling hills on fantastically smooth secondary highways. Our own state’s Kalamazoo College ended up being her choice and I admit I was happy with that since Kalamazoo is a mere 100 miles away from The Planet Ann Arbor and I could roll over there to visit my kids (they both ended up there) via the I94 18-wheel Slogway in pretty short order. And then drive back in the same day. I miss those days and that trip to K sometimes…

We were not that near any freeway on our recent day trip to Ohio. The back roads we traversed did not provide much in the way of the kind of scenery a lot of folks might like. It is mostly very flat terrain straight south of here. In the middle of January when nothing is growing anywhere, things can look very desolate. We looked for signs of prosperity, at least the GG did. So, the first photo is in Blissfield, which is actually still in Michigan. Big silos were all around that area. And so was the plume I saw from very far away. What is that? It couldn’t be from the nuclear towers in Monroe, those are too far away.

We did some turnabout driving to get close to the plant that was putting out all that stuff. I do not know enough of the details surrounding the GG’s long career dealing with emissions testing to know what the heck he might have been *exactly* thinking about that plume but, in the end, after we LABORIOUSLY figured out (rather extreme googling) that it was some sort of ethanol plant, he said something like, “It’s just a big still.” (He may ask me to take this statement down if he bothers to read it and I will if he asks me to.).

So we went down into Ohio and when we got back into Michigan again, we took a slightly different road (Silberhorn Highway) than we took down (Riga Rd.). Talk about crowned road? The GG said something like, “This would be an awful road to drive if it was icy.” A couple minutes later I asked him to please slow down. I do that a lot but, in this case, I was kind of seasick, even though he was not going all that fast, definitely under the speed limit, and it was not icy.

This was a beautiful day trip. I loved the flat kind of scenery we traversed and I intermittently captured whatever Drains we were near on Google Maps. I couldn’t gauge the health of the small towns we traveled through. We noticed the big agricultural installations but we also noticed horribly ramshackle houses and many empty storefronts. Not that I own the most gorgeous house on earth, as much as I love it…

One Response to “Beautiful desolation”

  1. Margaret Says:

    Great trip! I am not used to flat, so it’s hard for me to find beauty in it. 🙂