Author Archives: Denny

2023 in the Rear View

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The year in numbers with 2022 values in parentheses:

  • 7 (6) = Road trips reported
  • 81 (68) = Blog posts
  • 47 (35) = Days on the road
  • 2029 (1675) = Pictures posted — 866 (748) in the blog and 1,163 (927) in Road Trips

Everything went up this year. Everything that is except interest. I’ll discuss website traffic toward the end of this post but it’s probably not much of a spoiler to note that it continues its general decline. As for my own activity, I did get in one more trip than last year, and, unlike last year’s added trip, this one did translate to an increase in days on the road and pictures posted. Again, no trips from the year being reviewed made the top five but, unlike 2022 when there were no repeats from the previous year, the first four of 2023’s top five were repeats from 2022 and the fifth sort of was. Two of 2022’s top five blog posts made it again this year along with two brand new posts and one returning after an unusual absence. 

Top Blog Posts:

  1. Twenty Mile’s Last Stand
    Making its ninth appearance in the top five, this post about a nineteenth-century stagecoach stop turned roadhouse follows three consecutive seconds with its fourth first place. The previous three were in 2012, 2013, and 2019. It also ranked fourth in 2014 and fifth in 2018. On top of all that, this year the Twenty Mile’s Last Stand post accomplished something never before seen. In years past, the blog’s home page has always had more visits than any individual post but this time even it was bested by this post.
  2. Scoring the Dixie
    Like the Twenty Mile Stand post, this one moves up one spot from last year. It also appeared at third in 2015 plus first in 2020 and 2021 and fourth in 2012 and 2017. It describes my tracking of driven portions of the Dixie Highway. Because of some Conferedate-themed markers placed beside the road and what I consider a misunderstanding of the name, the Dixie Highway has been the subject of some negative stories in recent years. I’m not sure I entirely believe that “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” but I hope it is true in this case and that anyone brought here because of one of those negative articles sees that the Dixie Highway played an honorable and important part in the development of transportation in America.
  3. Review: A Christmas Carol
    Not many posts make the top five in their first year of existence. The full twelve months that posts from previous years have to accumulate visits is hard to compete with which makes the fact that this post did it in barely half a month almost unbelievable. A Christmas Carol has long been a favorite at Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park but was skipped in 2022 while a new theater was built. This post took a look at a new production in the new theater and that seems to have been something that quite a few people were interested in.
  4. Review: Route 66 Navigation
    This post, with the full name “Product Review — Route 66 Navigation — by Touch Media”, is also new for 2023. The product is a smartphone app that I wanted to review since its 2018 introduction but I did not get a chance to use it until the very end of 2022 then posted the review in February 2023. It was somewhat refreshing and quite encouraging to find that the product does just what it claims.
  5. My Wheels – Chapter 1 1960 J. C. Higgins Flightliner
    It’s baaaack! After slipping from the top five last year for the first time since it was published, the initial post in the My Wheels series returns in the fifth spot. Previous rankings have been first (2014, 2015, 2018), second (2013, 2016, 2017), third (2019, 2020), and fourth (2021).

Top Non-Blog Posts:

  1. Sixty-Six: E2E & F2F
    My third full-length drive of Historic Route 66 is back for its seventh top-five finish and its third finish in the top spot. It was also first in 2012 and 2021. In addition, it was second in 2019 and 2022, fourth in 2018, and fifth in 2015. The abbreviations in its name stand for End to End and Friend to Friend.
  2. Lincoln Highway West
    This 2009 trip was my first documented travel on the Lincoln Highway west of Indiana. It ranked third last year, fourth in 2020, and fifth in 2014.
  3. Lincoln Highway Conference 2011
    This Lincoln Highway-centered trip did not even appear in the top five until it took third in 2020 then placed first last year. It’s a good trip that adds all of US-36 and bits of the CA-1 and Route 66 to the Lincoln Highway bits.
  4. Kids & Coast
    This makes two fourths in a row for this 2008 Seattle to San Francisco trip. Like the 2011 Lincoln Highway trip above, it waited a long time to make the list but came in second in 2020 and is becoming a regular.
  5. Christmas MOP
    This is the top five finisher I said was sort of a repeat from 2022. The fifth-place non-blog entry in 2022 was the Christmas Escape Run of 2021. This year it is the Christmas Escape Run of 2022. My October Miles of Possibility trip had been cut short by COVID-19 so when Christmas came around I used a modified version of that unfulfilled itinerary for Christmas MOP. It may or may not be a coincidence that this trip is where I was able to study the Route 66 Navigation app for the review that was the fourth most popular blog post of 2023.

Blog visits edged up a bit but overall website visits continued to decline. I’m not completely confident that my web host is tracking and reporting statistics accurately but they are all I have. Overall visits dropped from 102,804 to 95,651. Blog visits rose from 4,187 to  4,366. Page views were completely out of sync with everything else last year when they hit an all-time high of 924,495. This year they are back in sync with the dropping visits at 651,826.

In case your seeing of DennyGibson.com posts is haphazard and you’d like it not to be, email lists and RSS feeds are available. Descriptions and links are provided in the website FAQ under How can I keep up with it?

Trip Peek #130
Trip #149
JHA 2018 Conference

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This picture is from my 2018 Jefferson Highway Association Conference trip. It shows me standing beside the JH terminus marker in New Orleans following a full-length drive of the highway that resulted in the book Jefferson Highway All the Way. The conference named in the trip title took place in St. Joseph, Missouri, near the midpoint of the highway, and was the anchor point for scheduling the trip.

Of course, most of the trip involved driving the historic Auto Trail from Winnipeg, Ontario, to New Orleans, Louisiana, but I did have to get to and from the highway’s endpoints. The mid-April dates had me dealing with some fairly heavy snowfall on the two-day drive north then the melting snow had me dealing with some mud after I turned south. My oldest son lived in New Orleans at the time so I got to visit him and his family after that selfie with the marker. When I did leave New Orleans, I took advantage of the opportunity to make my second full-length drive of the Natchez Trace.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Trip Peek #129
Trip #158
Finding (More Of) It Here

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This picture is from my 2019 Finding (More Of) It Here Christmas Escape Run. As I’ve explained, the sequence in which Trip Peeks are used is random but the timing of their use is a function of need. A common time of need is when I’m traveling and busy maintaining a trip journal. Even with all that randomness, Trip Peeks sometimes seem quite appropriate which is the case now when I need to use one because I’m in the middle of a Christmas Escape Run and what pops up is an earlier Christmas Escape Run. Christmas Escape Runs are trips I started taking in 2006 to avoid some of the holiday madness. In 2015, Ohio adopted the slogan “Ohio, find it here”, and I used it as the basis of the title of my 2016 all-Ohio Christmas Escape Run. It got reused, with the addition of a couple of words, when I set out on another all-Ohio run in 2019 and took this picture of some of the many nutcrackers in Steubenville. Although It has nothing to do with this post or the trip it peeks at, I’m happy to report that Ohio returned to the much cooler (IMO) “Ohio, the heart of it all” in 2023.

The picture was taken in the Nutcracker Village in Steubenville, the trip’s first stop. From there I headed north to spend Christmas and chase covered bridges in and around the fully winterized summer resort town of Geneva-on-the-Lake.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Haphazard Holidays

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Calling this trip “haphazard” might be a little strong but plans really aren’t very firm. I started on Winter Solstice with some solid plans and also have plans for some stops in Virginia. I hope to eventually reach where my son lives in New York but what goes in between is pretty murky.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

Book Review
Near Woods
Kevin Patrick

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The year Kevin Patrick spent “connecting with White’s Woods” may have been, as a blurb on the back of Near Woods says “In the spirit of Walden” but the resulting products are not the same. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was an experiment in self-sufficiency and the book he wrote some years later documented its success. His observations of nature and seasons were generally used to support some aspect of his minimalist lifestyle and not to educate the reader. I suppose some of Patrick’s observations are also made to reinforce some philosophical viewpoint, but he is a lot more subtle and he helps the reader share the raw observation as near as possible. Exactly one-half of this book’s pages are filled with some excellent photographs.

The word “spirit” also appears early in the book’s text. There Patrick says it is written in the spirit of other nature books and mentions, in addition to Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, Cousteau, and others. I believe what he means is the sharing of observations as accurately as possible and in a manner that promotes a real appreciation of what is being observed.

I’m not all that familiar with many of the authors named but did find myself making some comparisons with an author and book Patrick does not mention. In PrairieErth, William Least Heat Moon makes a deep dive into a single county in Kansas. In some sense, Patrick’s deep dive into the 250-acre White’s Woods is closer to Moon’s product than to Thoreau’s but that comparison is also far from perfect. By trying to look at that county from every possible angle, PrairieErth can sometimes seem like a writing class exercise. Near Woods looks at its subject from a lot of angles but not, I think, every angle. Just the interesting ones.

Of course, Near Woods is better looking than either Walden or PrairieErth. To some degree, that’s just something that color photographs do for a book. But these high-quality and well-chosen photos do more than make the book pretty. They are the “raw observations” mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. The book’s design incorporates the photos wonderfully and helps make reading the book a pleasure. Every lefthand page contains one or more photographs. Righthand pages are all text. Captions are in the extra wide inner margins of the text pages. It didn’t take me terribly long to recognize the beauty of this. Every page turn resulted in a new image that could be studied as quickly or slowly as desired before tackling a new page of text.

Sometimes there is a direct connection between text and photo and sometimes the connection is loose or non-existent. At one point a loose connection led me to believe that Kevin had cheated me or at least made a major goof. One of the more interesting finds in White’s Woods is a quad-trunk tulip tree. I really wanted to see this oddity as I read about it but the pictures next to the text were of something else entirely. A photo of the tulip tree in winter appears a page or two later and I realized that this is the image on the book’s back cover. The front cover shows this extraordinary tree in summer. I wasn’t cheated and the goof was all mine. Doh!

Photographs show the woods through one year of its life and the four seasons are used to organize the book. The woods’ history and possible future are mixed into the reporting of seasonal changes to provide some very pleasant lessons in natural and human history, horticulture, geography, and geology.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest, Kevin Patrick, Stackpole Books (May 1, 2023), 8.5 x 11 inches, 258 pages, ISBN 978-0811772211
Available through Amazon.

Don’t Christmas My Yule

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Heavens to Murgatroyd! How did I not know that? Until a few weeks ago I thought Yule was just another word for Christmas. Latin maybe. Or maybe German or Old — I mean Olde — English. Nope. The word itself is probably Norse in origin and the holiday it identifies predates Christ and Christ’s Mass by a bunch. There are many descriptions of Yule floating around and they vary quite widely but one of the things they all agree on is that Winter Solstice is involved. That’s important. It’s the thing I did not know. It’s something that distinguishes it from modern-day Christmas.

Of course, common sense and history point to a connection between Christmas and Solstice but these days no answer to the question “When is Christmas?” will contain the word Solstice. Conversely, the word Yule is used frequently in discussions of Christmas. It appears in officially designated Christmas carols and in greeting cards mailed from deeply religious homes. There are times when the words Christmas and Yule seem to be used interchangeably. That, no doubt, is why it took me three-quarters of a century to realize they are not interchangeable. One is tied to a naturally occurring planetary event. One is not.

The 12 Nights of Yule at the top of this post appears on numerous websites. I was unable to determine its origin so am unable to give credit. One of those sites is The Viking Dragon where an Origins of Yule post is quite informative. One bit I thought interesting is the fact that a King of Norway (Haakon the Good, 920–961) decreed that Yule and Christmas were to be celebrated at the same time. What better way to show the lack of a natural connection than a law arbitrarily linking them? The law also required every free man to consume a quantity of ale during the holiday which I assume is the reason that “the Good” was attached to his name.

The twelve days of observation is one of the more obvious things that the new guys copied from the old guys. The 12 Days of Yule begins the day before Solstice and runs through New Year’s Eve. The 12 Days of Christmas begins the day after Christmas and runs through January 6 which is the day associated with the arrival of the Magi or maybe Jesus’ christening. The Catholic Church calls this day Epiphany, and yes, I suppose you could use that word to describe my discovery that Yule was absolutely not another word for Christmas.

A Cosmic Reason for the Season — Reredux is this blog’s most recent previous post on the Winter Solstice. With plans to reference that post here, I looked it over and discovered that a website it linked to had disappeared. Since I thought its discussion of Solstice and Christmas a good one, I located the desired content through the WayBack Machine. fixed the existing links, and am including a direct link here. In previous Solstice-related posts, I’ve been upfront about the amount of time separating the post and the precise moment of Solstice. This year the event follows this post by 4 days 16 hours and 27 minutes.

Play Review
A Christmas Carol
Playhouse in the Park

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This is less a review of a play than the reporting of one more Cincinnati Christmas tradition being checked off of my list. I seem to have gotten away with calling Cincinnati’s production of Every Christmas Story Ever Told a tradition even though its first year was just 2006. Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park first staged A Christmas Carol a decade and a half earlier, in 1991, so I’m sure its status as a tradition will not be questioned by anyone. What might be questioned is just how much of a reset to this tradition has just occurred, and whether or not it matters.

I don’t believe I had ever previously seen a live performance of A Christmas Carol let alone one of the beloved Playhouse in the Park performances. Although the names are the same, neither the play I saw nor its setting are the same as they were in 1991. A new main theater was built for the Playhouse last year and the annual A Christmas Carol run was put on hold while one theater was torn down and another built in its place. Some changes in the production were required because of physical differences in the stages, and the Playhouse’s artistic director, Blake Robison, took advantage of the hiatus to produce a new script. So the same Charles Dickens story of the ultimate grumpy old man being scared into a complete about-face is being told this year but the telling is not quite the same.

I obviously can’t tell you how the new compares with the old. I can tell you that the production I attended on Wednesday was spectacular in a way that could start a new tradition though I hope it will let an existing one get a new grip and continue.

That word “spectacular” applies most readily to the scenery and costumes. The onstage world looks exactly like what I’d expect a cleaned-up Dickensian world to look like. A giant clock anchors the set and also anchors the audience in stepping through the events of a long Christmas Eve. Special effects, puppets, and moving stage elements add to the sense of spectacle. When telling a story that everyone knows, the “how” really does outweigh the “what”.

Except for my comments about the new theater, pretty much everything I’ve said could be replaced with “Looks good to me” and that’s really all I’m qualified to say. For a real review, check out David Lyman’s report in the Enquirer which includes some official photos. A Christmas Carol will be at Playhouse in the Park through December 30. Go help a new tradition get started or help nudge an old one into a new phase. 

Yippee-Ki-Yule, Y’all

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On Thursday, I got a double dose of holiday hoopla. The first dose was administered at Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati’s Eden Park. The second came at Thomas More Stadium in Florence, KY.

This year’s holiday show at Krohn is called “Golden Days of Yule”. That name, coupled with my improved understanding of Yule (the subject of next week’s post), was one reason I wanted to visit Krohn this month. Another was that I realized it had been ten years since I’d seen the holiday display at the conservatory. All of my visits since 2013 were to see butterflies.

“Golden Days of Yule”, like previous holiday shows at Krohn, has lots of Cincinnati landmarks such as Music Hall in the opening photograph. All are made of locally sourced plant material and most return year after year. New this year is the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center pictured at left.

Numerous model trains travel among the landmarks and the conservatory’s normal display of plants. Even though no train has ever crossed the real John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, this version has a double set of tracks so that a train with a Cincinnati Reds boxcar can cross it in both directions.

Other returning favorites include Union Terminal, now the Cincinnati Museum Center, and Findlay Market, which is encircled by Thomas the Train. Procter & Gamble’s Twin Towers and the Tyler Davidson Fountain, featuring The Genius of Water, appear together in the third photo although the relationship between the two is nowhere near accurate in either size or location.

It somehow makes sense that the Krohn Conservatory contains a model of the Krohn Conservatory and there might be nothing more natural for a conservatory to hold at Christmas time than a giant poinsettia tree. “Golden Days of Yule” runs through January 7 with live music on weekends.

Thomas More Stadium, on the other side of the Ohio River, is home to the Florence Y’alls Class A baseball team. Winters here are way too cold for baseball so, for the second year in a row, a skating rink and 2.5 million lights have been moved in for Deck the Y’alls.

There are lights everywhere both inside and outside the stadium. They are impressive to look at from just about anywhere but following a path through the displays at field level is the main attraction.

A family of four was near me during the early part of my walk and the youngest child asked her mother to read the lighted signs that marked each section. As soon as she heard “Dinoland”, she announced that she was not going in there. I’ve a hunch that it was what she saw and not what she heard that prompted her reluctance. The family hung back at the arch but after a few minutes, I saw them move ahead slowly. Before long they were back at their normal pace. Up close, dinosaurs made of electric lights just aren’t that scary, it seems.

And “Ornament Land” just wasn’t scary at all.

Apparently, neither was “Under the Sea” although I lost track of the family somewhere around The Blue Whale of Florence.

Here’s a sampling of the “12 Days of Christmas”. In reality, this whole post is just a sampling.  There’s a lot more here than what I’ve shown.

This is the exit. I hung back to take some pictures — and watch and learn from the people in front of me —  then passed through the maze and headed for a cup of hot coffee.

As I sipped that coffee, I captured a short overview video. Deck the Y’alls runs through New Year’s Day with fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
 
  

For anyone wondering about the team name, it comes from a water tower. The short story is that while Florence Mall was in development, a water tower advertising it was erected nearby. Because the mall did not yet actually exist, that led to some legal issues which were resolved by hastily converting the “M” to “Y'”. This was supposed to be temporary but proved so popular that it remains today even though the mall has now been in operation for decades. A fuller version of the story is here. The team was founded as the Florence Freedom in 2004 but changed its name to Y’alls in 2020.

Last Flash Flash Back

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A ten-year-old blog post recently appeared in this site’s traffic statistics. The post told about the last issue of a publication devoted to a veteran’s organization to which my father had belonged. It isn’t terribly unusual for ten-year-old posts to get hits but I really can’t remember the last time this particular post appeared. The hit prompted me to reread the post and even update it a little. In the process, I was also prompted to let my thoughts wander down several of the many paths uncovered by my reading. Whoever clicked on the search result that took them to this old post missed Veterans/Armistice Day by a couple of weeks and this post misses it by even more but my mind — and maybe yours too — is still in a slightly reflective mood. So this week’s post consists of just this paragraph and a link to that ten-year-old post. Reflect as much or as little as pleases you: One Last Flash

TG ’23

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At one time, possibilities for Thanksgiving dinner included an Indiana state lodge with an overnight stay and an Ohio state lodge without. I dithered just a little too long, however, and both were completely filled before I made my calls. So I hastily put together a Plan C which involved an overnight stay in a Kentucky state lodge. That ‘C’ could stand for “cave” or “Carter” or both. Carter Caves State Resort Park was my destination as I crossed the Ohio River. 

Most of the miles I drove in Kentucky were on KY‑9 which roughly parallels the Ohio River although it is usually at some distance. It’s a pretty nice-looking drive but the low morning sun and the mostly eastern bearing were no help at all in photographing the scenery. After just under a hundred miles of KY-9, Garmin had me turn south on KY-2 where the sun was less intrusive and the scenery possibly even better as the road ran along Buffalo Creek. After a few miles of KY-2, the GPS directed me onto KY-7 and then, barely a mile later, onto Sutton Road. Sutton Road soon became gravel. With my destination just a few miles away, I saw no reason for concern…

…until I reached a T. The road to the right was marked with a “DEAD END” sign. To the left was a low water bridge with not much that I could see beyond it. Garmin assured me that Carter Caves Park was just a few minutes away on the other side. While I contemplated the situation, I checked the GPS to see if it was really in “Faster” mode and not in “Shorter” or “Adventurous” mode. It was. I have gone straight ahead in similar situations in the past but on this day I wasn’t in adventurous mode either. After turning around and traveling a short distance, I could look back and see a road heading off on the other side of the stream. I was tempted but continued on the prudent path.

I entered the park about half an hour later after a drive of 20, rather than 2, miles. Even so, I was there way ahead of my scheduled dinner time and assumed it was also too early to check in. I explored the park in my car and found every possible parking spot near the lodge/restaurant filled. The feeding frenzy was in full swing. There was a reasonable mix of cars and open spaces at the visitor center so I pulled in to take a look.

Once inside, I was pleasantly surprised to find that cave tours were taking place that day and even more pleasantly surprised to learn that a tour of X‑Cave was starting in just five minutes. X‑Cave is not very large but it does have a lot of interesting formations. It gets its name from two passageways that intersect to form an ‘X’. Tours travel through one side of the ‘X’, step outside, reenter, and travel through the other side. On the first pass through the intersection, the tour guide shared the cave’s very own Daniel Boone story. It’s extra appropriate on Thanksgiving Day.

While hunting one day, Boone spotted the largest turkey he had ever seen. He inexplicably missed his first shot but saw the turkey enter the cave  He hurriedly lit a torch and followed. Reaching the underground intersection, Boone saw the turkey down one of the passageways and fired. In his haste and weak light, the frontiersman had overloaded his rifle with powder and the blast threw him backward with such force that the imprint of his foot can still be seen. The turkey was missed once again by the shot but was so badly frightened that it instantly turned to stone.

Things were still busy at the lodge but I was now able to find a parking spot. I was even able to check into my room where I relaxed until dinner time. There is a salad bar behind me and a dessert-filled table just beyond the ham carving station. I helped myself to turkey and stuffing and more but decided against the ham when I reached it. I think that was because I had also helped myself to that other traditional Thanksgiving entree, catfish, when I filled my plate. After dinner, as I again relaxed in my room, I decided to get on board with the popular Elf on a Shelf craze.

When I left the lodge on Friday, I was only slightly surprised when the GPS directed me to turn left rather than retrace the way I’d arrived. Even though the road name didn’t register immediately, it did eventually, and as Sutton Road became narrower and more gravely, I knew exactly where Garmin was leading me.

This is the other side of that low-water bridge where I turned around Thursday. On Friday, having seen both sides, I had no qualms about splashing right on through. In fact, I was quite happy to do so and erase some of the guilt I felt about not splashing through the day before.