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Day Trips in Different Directions

 Last week, Mike and I went in opposite directions—Mike headed east to Hocking Hills, and I went west to Vevay, Indiana. Just some short trips to keep busy while we are hovering around Cincy for a couple more weeks, but nice side jaunts to pass the time.

Mike Heads to Hocking Hills

Buddy John and I cruised up to Hocking Hills State Park the other day. The park is on the edge of the Appalachian Plateau, just inside the hills that stop the periodic glaciers from getting into Southeastern Ohio. So the area has drainage features from the pre-, inter-, and post-glacial periods. It’s a wild collection of gorges, rock houses, and waterfalls that people have been wondering over for thousands of years.

Old Man’s Cave in Hocking Hills
Because the drainage area upstream of the park is now fairly small, most of the time the waterfalls don’t show much water. But this trip was different given our very wet Spring. Water everywhere, very impressive. A beautiful day, capped off by dinner at the Old Canal Smokehouse in Chillicothe, maybe the best BBQ place in Southern Ohio. The only place I've been to that gives Old Canal a run for its money is the Scioto Ribber in Portsmouth.


The waterfall at Ash Cave in Hocking Hills

Julie Travels to Vevay, Indiana

I headed to a quilt shop we’d heard about in Vevay, Indiana, with my friends Barb and Diane last week. We had a nice drive through the green rolling hills of southeast Indiana, heading southwest after going through Aurora, where Barb’s relatives lived when she was growing up. Then it was country roads and kind of cloudy skies as we passed through the tiny towns of Aberdeen and East Enterprise. We went by an old church that had been converted into a house which was quite interesting.

Then down into Vevay on Ferry Street, to Pike Street, where we found Cardinal Quilts. If you don’t collect fabric—I mean, make quilts!—you might not know how much fun it is to be in a store that is wall to wall to wall bolts and folds of fabric. We probably spent an hour there, and it’s a great shop because they buy leftovers, still great fabric but out of style or out of season or just not the newest thing, and they sell it all for $5 a yard. Which is cheap these days. We bought a lot of fabric.

 
Cardinal Quilts in Vevay, and some of the fabric I bought there for future quilts

Then we went in search of a restaurant for lunch. The first place was closed due to a doctor’s appointment (it’s a small town, what can I say), the second place was a bar, but we hit gold with the third place, an Italian restaurant that had a pizza and salad buffet on Fridays. And it was $5 if you were oldsters like us. So I’m calling Vevay the $5 town.

As we wandered around town, I noticed that the streets all had regular street name signs, but there were also street names in French attached to buildings at intersections. I had to find out what was behind that, and discovered that the town's founder was a Swiss immigrant and winemaker named John James Dufour, who purchased land in the Northwest territory to grown grapes for wine. He founded the town in 1802, and named it for the French-speaking Swiss town of Vevey. There's a Swiss Wine Festival every year in month, another vestige of its French speaking origins.

After lunch, we stopped by the Switzerland County Community Arts Center, which featured crafts and artwork by local artists, a lot of cool things. Then we headed back to Cincinnati, and by that time the skies were blue and the sun was shining, and it was a pleasant drive back through the Indiana landscape.


The Community Arts Center in Vevay

We now see an end in sight to our stay in Green Township, and I hope to be reporting on some of the historic and geologic features of the Oregon Trail in just a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

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