This Trip Is Sanitized For Your Protection
We couldn’t wait to get to Alaska.
We had started keeping track of our family’s travels throughout the U.S. back in 2011. After 9 years of hard work, everything had led up to the summer of 2020. We’d reached 49 states together, and now, with Sarah about to leave home for college, everything had worked together to reach the climax and the end of our journey. It was going to be a vacation for the ages: 2 weeks, starting with a cruise from Vancouver through the Inside Passage up to Seward, followed by a road trip around the state, packing in as many sights as we possibly could. We were even going to splurge on a flight to Glacier Bay National Park, a stay in the remote lodge there and an all-day boat tour of one of the most remote national parks in the U.S. It was going to be huge, expensive, and incredibly memorable.
Man plans…God laughs.
A year later, we’re still at 49 states on the family counter (we were at 44 for Drew, but…well, read further for an update there). There was no cruise. No glorious arctic scenery. No remote boat tour. Just a whole lot of sitting around our house and watching Netflix. By the way, I think we’ve completed Netflix. Being locked in your house for a year will do that. They should give you a virtual badge or something, like “Achievement Unlocked: Netflix Library Completion” or “World’s Greatest Couch Potato”.
We held onto the idea of the Alaska trip as long as we could. We were supposed to go in July, and when our country first locked down in March, I was optimistic and thought we might still be able to travel over the summer, because surely everyone would follow the same rules and selflessly do what was best for the health and wellbeing of their fellow countrym—
HA! Sorry, I couldn’t make it through that sentence with a straight face. When it became apparent in summer that the pandemic wasn’t going away anytime soon, we sadly called the whole thing off, which meant I was going to have to keep track of various airline and cruise credits and hope we could figure out how to use them all in 2021.
In the meantime, we were stuck in the house. And like everyone else on the planet, we quickly grew tired of staring at the walls of our house, online meetings, taking walks around the neighborhood, and attempting to find quality amidst a sea of mediocrity on Netflix (we did very much enjoy The Imagineering Story and The Mandalorian on
Disney+). If you need a Netflix show, we got a lot of laughs out of The Good Place.
Over the summer, my sister-in-law had a baby. He was their fourth child (I mean, can you imagine?? FOUR kids?? You have to be some kind of a masochist to do that to yourself) and they were as sick of the pandemic as we were, so they invited us to come out to Ohio for a visit to meet our new nephew. So, we started scheming. They’d been tested repeatedly for COVID as part of the hospital screening process. We could get tested before we left. At that point, some states were trending downward in numbers over the summer and were easing some travel restrictions. And traveling by ourselves in a car, we could largely keep to ourselves, sticking to the van, our hotel room, and my brother’s house and eating outdoors or getting takeout.
Plus, at that point, Drew was at 44 states and was missing several in the Rust Belt: Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, which are…sort of close to Ohio. I mean, it’s only like a couple of inches on the map.
So we decided to make the trip, if only for our own sanity.
How bad had it gotten? My kids were
pumped about the prospect of driving across Ohio. We’ve done that drive before. It’s 8.5 hours to Perrysburg, Ohio from my house. There’s nothing in Pennsylvania or Ohio on that drive. They would be staring at farm fields. And they were
excited about it.
I threw together a quick itinerary for a trip over the 4th of July weekend. This would enable me to save a vacation day by traveling over a holiday, so that later in the year I could use that extra vacation day to…watch Netflix, I guess.
Once a vacation planner, always a vacation planner.
We left on a Wednesday evening, driving part of the way and spending the night in a Somerset, PA hotel room. All of the hotel rooms had stickers across the door frames showing no one had been in there since it had been cleaned, which was reassuring because we knew from reading articles posted on social media that viral particles cannot get past stickers on the doors.
All kidding aside, I was glad the hotels were making whatever efforts they could.
On Thursday morning, we left Somerset and continued northwest, making a stop in Ohio at
Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This was a park we’d visited on that
first road trip back in 2011. The park mostly exists to preserve the old historic Ohio & Erie canal, which was a major trade route back in the day along the Cuyahoga River (the same river that once
caught fire in Cleveland).
For our purposes, we were only using it as an excuse to break up the drive. Not far off I-80 is Brandywine Falls, probably the most scenic portion of the park. There’s a parking area nearby and a short boardwalk trail down to a viewing area for the falls.
That’s worth getting out of the car for, right?
We made it to Perrysburg and had a nice visit with my brother and his family. On Friday, we drove an hour north for two reasons: 1) to pick up another state for Andrew, and 2) to visit the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Yep, just when we’ve finished sending Sarah to school, now Dave is close to graduating and we need to go through the college search all over again. Dave is interested in mechanical engineering, so we’ve been trying to research schools strong in that subject, and Michigan is one of the schools on the list.
And I apparently took no photos. I will hang my head in shame.
Michigan is a massive school, and it basically encompasses the entire city of Ann Arbor. It was hard to tell where the campus ended and the city began—they just sort of overlap. There were no official visits or tours happening, of course, so we just made it up as we went. We found the engineering buildings, took a peek through the windows, and just tried to get a feel for where everything was. It wasn’t the prettiest campus, and certainly not the stereotypical classical brick buildings you would normally imagine. I’m sure it’s an excellent school, and it certainly offers any possible activity you could think of. I’m sure the winters would be cold and it’s a fair distance from home. But Dave seemed to like it there, and his opinion is really the only one that matters, at least until the financial aid offers come in.
We ate an outdoor lunch at
Zingerman’s Roadhouse, which my brother claimed was the place for Michigan football fans to hang out. I remember it being…fine. I had the smoked brisket sandwich, and it was decent, but I’ve had better.
We spent an evening eating pizza and swimming in my brother’s pool, and then headed out the following morning. We drove back to Delaware by way of Louisville, Kentucky.
The only reason we did this was to continue to cheaply add states to Drew’s list. My brother had recently accepted a job in Charleston, SC, so this was going to be the last time we had an excuse to be out this way, so we were doing our best to take advantage. On the way, we stopped in Dayton, Ohio to stretch our legs and check out the offices of the Wright Cycle Co., part of the larger
Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.
The Cycle Co. is, of course, the preserved bicycle shop that Orville and Wilbur Wright operated in Dayton back at the turn of the 19th century while they worked on their plans for their mechanized flying machine. Sadly, we were unable to get a passport stamp for our National Parks passport since everything was shut down. But once again, we could peek in the windows and take a break from driving.
We got to Louisville in time for our 2:00 p.m. tour of the
Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. Again, this was a
repeat of a stop we’d made in 2011, but somehow Drew had missed out on that visit. He gave some lame excuse like he was “not alive in 2011”, but I think he was probably just being lazy or not paying attention. You know what little boys are like.
The tour is a neat one, about 30-45 minutes where they take you through the process of making a baseball bat. For 2020, they were open, but admission was limited to timed tickets and everyone had to wear a mask. A couple quick photos:
Outside the building is the “world’s largest baseball bat”.
Inside, you can see the various steps of what is largely an automated process. Here are the pallets of raw wood cylinders ready to take shape via the machines in the shop.
These are the cuts of wood specially selected for major league ballplayers with contracts with Louisville Slugger. These meet the precise specifications each player asks for in his bats.
Near the end, this guy was giving a demonstration of how they used to have to carve the bats by hand. It looked painful and labor-intensive, but it was also a bit mesmerizing watching the man work.
After the tour, you’re led into a museum with quite a bit of memorabilia, including bats used by hall-of-famers, some of which you can hold for photos. Here’s one used by Babe Ruth during his famous 60-home-run 1927 campaign. It’s a little hard to see, but he would cut a notch around the center label every time he hit a home run with it.
The tour is very efficient. You can even order a personalized bat before it starts, and it will be ready for you by the end of the tour. It makes for a pretty cool souvenir. The other fun part of the museum is the batting cage, where for a couple bucks you can take 10 swings with a major league model bat. I had learned my lesson back in 2011 when I had chosen to take some swings with Jim Thome’s bat and faced the high-speed machine. Thome is a mountain of a man, and if I stood next to him I would look like
Flat Stanley if Flat Stanley was allowed to have a beer gut. I never had a chance and barely fouled off maybe 3 of 10 pitches.
This time, I took Didi Gregorius’ (current Phillie) much lighter bat, asked for the slow-pitch machine, and had a much better time making solid contact. Know thy limits. Or, put another way:
We took a short drive over to the riverfront and parked near a pedestrian bridge over the Ohio River. It’s called the
Big Four Bridge, and it was an old railroad line that was converted to a walkway between Kentucky and Indiana. If you’re thinking this was a really cheap and lame excuse to get Drew to set foot in Indiana so we could cross that state off the list, you would be absolutely correct.
I think Louisville is a very underrated city. We’ve enjoyed both of our visits there, and the riverfront park is a very nice place to visit. Sadly, we had discovered a restaurant there that we’d fallen in love with in 2011, and it had abruptly closed a few years later. So we had to find a new place.
We ended up staying just east of the city and ordering takeout from a local BBQ place called
Mark’s Feed Store. Kentucky was a little less restrictive than some of the other states we’d visited, and mask-wearing was optional at best (at least it seemed that way to our rule-following family), so we just got takeout and took it back to the hotel rooms. Everything was tasty and probably even better if we could have eaten it fresh at the restaurant.
That happened to be the 4th of July, but as we all know, the pandemic changed our country’s celebrations in 2020. Most cities cancelled their fireworks displays, not wanting to attract huge crowds of people. This was true in Louisville as well. But that night, we had another in a long line of happy accidents on our vacations.
As you know, I do my best to plan these trips within an inch of their lives, all driven by a desire to maximize our time, create everlasting memories and not miss out on anything. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. But along the way there have been many moments that have been unexpectedly amazing, like the time
I stumbled into a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center or happened to catch the
Blue Angels buzzing the tower while we were up in the Space Needle. I try to take credit for these moments as sheer incredible vacation planning, but I think my family might be onto me. I guess it’s more just confirmation that you should plan the trip and go, because you just don’t know what magical treasures are out there waiting for you to discover.
This particular night, we had a room on a high floor in the hotel (I can take credit for requesting that one, I like trying to get a room with a view). We happened to be facing west toward the city. And as darkness fell that night, the sky lit up for a solid 30 minutes. Apparently everyone in Kentucky has their own private stash of fireworks and was not afraid to use them. I should not have been surprised by this. But we sat back in the room and enjoyed a 180-degree view of fireworks all over the night sky.
In the morning, we drove east into West Virginia, and just like that, Drew was now up to 48 states on his own (he needs Alaska and Hawaii to complete all 50). We made a quick stop in Lexington, to drive through the campus of the University of Kentucky, and another stop for lunch on a whim at a local chain in West Virginia called
Tudor’s Biscuit World. We learned there that our whims are sometimes defective, and we promised to be more vigilant in the future when making decisions on an empty stomach.
But we survived, and we persevered, and that afternoon we made it to the newest national park,
New River Gorge National Park (it was still a national river when we visited, but apparently late last year they aced the interview and were promoted to national park status). Again, the visitor center was closed, but we were able to take a short trail to an overlook where we could see the famous arch bridge over the New River.
We drove down to Blacksburg, Virginia for the evening. Blacksburg is the home of
Virginia Tech University, another strong engineering school. We walked from the hotel to a restaurant called
Macado’s, which has a huge menu listing just about every possible sandwich combo you could possibly think of. This place was a winner. I had a very tasty chicken parm sandwich (called the “Julius Caesar”) and would gladly eat here again.
In the morning, we did yet another DYI tour of the Virginia Tech campus. The campus basically is the reason for the town’s existence, as it’s built in a beautiful setting in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The buildings are somewhat gothic and have a strong Harry Potter vibe to them. It’s a former military academy and much more of a “stereotypical” college campus than Michigan was.
I’m a little biased because when I was looking at colleges back in the stone ages, I fell in love with Virginia Tech and really wanted to go to school there. I loved the campus, setting, people we met, and the fact that the college had its own golf course. But then they barely offered any money, and that was that. I was hoping Dave would fall for it as well, but I think he was a bit worried that it was out in the middle of nowhere. Also, the mechanical engineering building was a little run-down, not nearly as impressive as the rest of the campus. So he seemed a bit cool on it overall. Well, this is why we visit.
The drive home was made without incident. We’d been a bit nervous about traveling during a pandemic, but I felt like we’d been able to keep to ourselves for the most part, and everyone was glad we’d gone. For the moment, we were wondering if we’d get to travel again in the foreseeable future.
Thankfully, we did pull another pandemic trip off. I’ll jump into that next time.