26-27 May 2024 Dayton, Ohio

So nice to be able to visit family in Ohio! Below L to R are: great-nephew Roy, great-niece Autumn, and sister-in-law Joyce.

On Sunday, Autumn and I headed out to Glen Helen Nature Preserve. It’s located just east of Dayton, Ohio and the preserve encompasses 1,125 acres, all accessible from a 15-mile network of trails. We climbed up a big rock, went into a small cave behind a waterfall, hiked up on top of the hill, refilled our water bottles at Yellow Spring, headed down to the world’s largest beaver dam that has flooded out many acres of the forest, and managed to hike more than 5 miles while having lots of fun and exploring.

Afterwards, we headed to Young’s Dairy as we had definitely definitely earned some ice cream! I was excited to learn that Autumn hopes to come to Maine this fall to attend UMaine at Farmington and study education. Would be great to have her nearby!

That evening, Roy chose to go to Spaghetti Warehouse in Dayton to celebrate his graduation from high school. They have a trolley car in the restaurant, and we had fun having dinner inside the trolley car.

On Monday, Roy and I headed to the Air Force Museum. This places is enormous! They have 4 gigantic hangers, each with airplanes from different different eras. My favorite hangar was the most recent era with Air Force One and the Space Shuttle, both of which you could walk through. We also saw 2 really interesting 45-minute movies: D-Day and Fighter Pilot. Roy chose the D-Day movie and although I am not much of a history buff nor a fan of hearing details of how different battles unfolded, Tom Brokaw did a great job of narrating this movie and explaining what a turning point the battle of Normandy was in World War II. I chose the Fighter Pilot movie which had a lot of scenes similar to Top Gun - it was about training with our allies for potential future air combat. Very impressive!

Always so nice to visit family and friends when on the road!