What's High in the Middle and Round on Both Ends

STATES VISITED: West Virginia / Ohio / Kentucky

There's always the stuff you've forgotten on your trip -- you're just lucky if it turns out not to be critical. We were halfway across the George Washington Bridge on Day One when I realized that I'd forgotten the bottles of sunscreen and bugspray I'd bought specifically to take with us. No biggie, right? But over the next couple days it became clear that other things had been forgotten -- underwear, swim suits, a soccer ball for pre-season training -- so first thing this morning we headed to a Wal-Mart in Triadelphia,WV, to remedy the matter. Those gigantimundo stores always send me into a spaced-out fugue state; I can wander around for hours, filling my jumbo shopping cart with things I don't need just because they are so incredibly cheap. And this Wal-Mart was a special super-sized one, so getting out was even more of a challenge. The rest of the suburban hilltop was loaded with other brand-new chain stores with empty parking lots -- kinda spooky. If we weren't on a schedule, we would have checked out the immense Cabela's that dominated the hilltop: The World's Largest Outdoor Outfitters. It looked like the kind of place even Daniel Boone would get lost in. I'm sure it would have been a perfect way to cap our West Virginia experience. But, well, miles to go and all that....

As soon as we crossed the state line into Ohio, we noticed that the hills were becoming gentler and the sky wider. Beautiful Ohio farmland -- what a welcome sight to me. The highway ribboned out straight before us, lapping up the rolling landscape as we powered across I-70 to Columbus, which always impressed me as a kid on our family car drives east. It still has one of the best skylines in the Midwest, I think. No Rust Belt decay here, at least from what we could tell from an hour's quick stop-off for lunch.



Hugh was interested in seeing Columbus mainly because he wanted to check out the Nationwide Arena, where the Columbus Blue Jackets hockey team plays. So we did. Of course since it isn't hockey season now we couldn't go inside, but the pilgrimage was duly made. (Oh, please don't tell me that after we've made all this effort to help Hugh cross off all the major-league baseball stadiums on his life list, now he's going to start on the hockey arenas too.)





From there we headed southwest to Cincinnati. (Isn't it cool how Ohio has a city in every corner -- Cleveland in the northeast, Toledo in the northwest, Cincinnati in the southwest, and . . . well, the southeast corner kinda gets cut off, doesn't it? But then there are Columbus and Dayton in the middle, too, all those solid mid-sized cities, each holding their own. I love Ohio.)

The drive south from Columbus ran through more fertile farmland -- broad fields of corn, soybeans, alfafa, each a slightly different texture, a slightly different shade of green, a vast tapestry of croplands. Bob keeps remarking on how flat it is, but I don't know, I like it flat. Sorry, but this is what I think countryside should look like.


Here's a beautiful white barn we saw on the road to Cincinnati.





We had a little incident with the GPS -- or Ms. Garmin, as we now call her -- who started sending us north on I-75 as we were just starting to get into Cincinnati proper. Then she pretended she hadn't screwed up and kept saying "Recalculating. Recalculating" as if it was OUR fault. The little minx.

We finally got into Cincinnati and checked into the downtown Westin by 4:30, which meant I had to scramble to get down the street to the Underground Railroad Museum, which closes at 5. Hard to believe it, but I couldn't talk any of the kids into coming with me. The nice folks at the desk let me in free because the place was just about to close. I breezed through the exhibits, wishing I'd had time to stop and read every plaque and watch every haunting video. I saw some intriguing artifacts -- old rusty manacles, a reconstructed log cabin, raggedy dresses -- and dramatic dioramas. Not surprisingly, this museum considers John Brown a visionary hero, and displays the photographs of him that look like Abraham Lincoln instead of the really wild-eyed shots. It's a cool museum, though -- I'm glad I had at least 20 minutes there. I'd have kicked myself if I'd missed it entirely.

The Westin is just a couple blocks from the riverfront, which means we could walk to the ballpark for the Reds game tonight. First, though, we had to walk across the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky, just so we could say we'd visited Kentucky. We took the old Cincinnati-Covington suspension bridge, which we learned was built by John Roebling, the same guy who did the much longer Brooklyn Bridge a couple years later. You can definitely see the resemblance.





Having officially touched Kentucky soil, we headed back across the river and joined the crowds flowing into the ballpark, which has a great riverfront location. It's a pretty new ballpark, I think, and it's well-designed from what I can tell, if perhaps a bit generic. It's called the Great American Ballpark, which seems like pretty bold talk until you figure out that it's underwritten by the Great American Insurance company across the street.

Here are the kids and Bob at our seats, which were on the first base line. I have to say that the stadium seemed awfully big; it was only about half full, although on a weeknight this early in the season, with the Reds not leading their division, I guess it's not surprising it wasn't packed. But what do I know? I've gotten too used to Yankee Stadium, I guess.

My dad was always a huge Reds fan, so I had to think of him, and how much he would have enjoyed knowing we were at a Reds game.

One cool feature of the park was the pavilion across the outfield from home plate, which is rigged up to look like an old-timey riverboat. You can't really see that in the picture, but here's a close-up of these smokestacks. When the crowd sings the Star Spangled Banner, on the line "the bombs bursting in air," red fireworks shoot out of the smokestacks. Nice touch.

The Reds have been around since 1869, which is pretty impressive. They were originally known as the Redlegs, so their big-head mascot is Mr. Redlegs. We loved his handlebar mustache. The kids are convinced that this is like Conan O'Brian's fantasy image of old-timey baseball players.

The Reds ended up losing the game -- their pitcher, Bronson Arroyo, just didn't seem to have any stuff tonight, and the pitcher for the Diamondbacks, Dan Haren, was much better. The D-backs are the bottom of their division and the Reds in the middle of theirs, but that's the thing I love about baseball: On any one night, any team can beat any other teams, if the stars are aligned right. That's why the World Series needs seven games, I guess. Anyhow, there were a few exciting moments in the later innings, once the starting pitchers were gone and things got a little edgier, but in the end the Diamondbacks won, 6-2.

The highlight of the evening for me? I got to try a Skyline Chili cheese coney. Skyline Chili is the biggest chain selling Cincinnati's most beloved local food, chili. It's the Official Chili of the Cincinnati Reds, naturally. They even display bowls of chili for that between-innings video game on the jumbotron where you're supposed to pick which of three identical images is hiding the baseball.

I don't know if everybody in Cincinnati is really a chili fan or if that's just visitors bureau guff. All I can say is that I finally got a chance to try some Skyline Chili on my hot dog, and it was absolutely lip-smacking delicious.