Tag Archives: Holiday

Cars Galore

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I attended the Pap’s Rod Shop Labor Day Bash on Monday but I still don’t know much about it. At least not much about its organizers or venue although both are obviously quite interesting. The venue was the Evans Family Ranch which appears to be a thriving operation offering a variety of products and services. The results of a search for Paps Rod Shop are not so clear cut. Most hits point to a Facebook group or to announcements of or reports on the bash. One of the administrators of the 6K+ member Paps Rods n Kustoms Facebook group claims Pap’s Rod Shop as a workplace. Following that clue led to this video report about that administrator and a not quite public shop near Springfield, Ohio. Good stuff, for sure.

The word “rod” in the title, made me think of cars like these, and pre-1940s coupes and roadsters stuffed with modern V8s were certainly well-represented at the bash.

Of course, there are also some later-model vehicles with upgraded (to say the least) power plants on display. 

There was a time when engine upgrades were not required to make a car a hotrod. In those days, Mopars with toilet-bowl-sized carburetors and supercharged Studebakers came straight from the factory.

Posters for the bash spoke of more than 600 cars on display and I’m guessing that could be right. Among them were some decidedly non-rod and non-hot vehicles. That group is represented here by this personal memory jogger. My very first car was a 4-door 2-tone 1953 Chevy. Mine was a top-of-the-line Bel Air and green instead of blue and it had a 3-speed stick rather than a 2-speed Powerglide. I also believe mine had more rust but other aspects of this example, such as the engine compartment you could pretty much climb into, look very familiar.

Parade, Precip, Parade, Precip, Boom

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The next day’s weather did not look promising when I went to bed on July 3rd. I had earlier noted a few parades that were candidates for my Independence Day agenda but the predicted full day of rain made actually attending any of them seem unlikely. That was still my opinion when I first checked the forecast after waking up but a closer look revealed that rain, although certainly on the way, might not arrive until very late morning. I decided to venture out to nearby Maineville where a parade was scheduled for 10:00 AM.

I found a parking spot less than a block from the parade route and at the appointed time heard the national anthem being sung a few hundred yards away at the town center. A few speeches, which I couldn’t quite make out, followed and the parade began to move about 10:10.

A lawn tractor pulling a trailer full of Girl Scouts passed shortly after the 1943 Farmall at the top of the page. More Girl and Boy Scouts followed along with cars, motorcycles, and jugglers. Ain’t that America?

It’s also very American to have politicians and local businesses promoting themselves in parades. I don’t know that I had ever seen a hearse in a parade but when one of those local businesses is a funeral home there is no question that it belongs. A festival was taking place in the town’s park but the skies were threatening and I headed home following the parade. Rain started falling before I got there.

I used to have a Maineville address although I did not live inside the village. Somehow, I had never attended an event there before today. I also once had a Loveland address but it was well inside the city limits and I have attended many events — including several Independence Day celebrations — there. Their parade was scheduled for 7:00 PM, the afternoon rain ended way before that, and the next round wasn’t due to arrive until much later. Parking for my second parade of the day was not nearly as convenient as it had been for the first. I parked outside of town at the high school and rode a shuttle bus. 

I don’t doubt that the parade started right on time but I was some distance away and it wasn’t until about 7:25 that the parade’s first vehicles passed by. Right behind the lead police car was the parade Grand Marshall George Foster, former Cincinnati Red and member of the Big Red Machine.

The name Loveland has led to the city’s longtime association with Valentine’s Day. Each year, volunteers see that thousands of cards are stamped with the phrase “There is nothing in the world so sweet as love” and the local postmark. The parade featured both Miss Valentine, Joan Dawson, and The Valentine Lady, Becky Giver. There is a nice article about the Valentine Ladies here

The parade also had Batman, the Loveland Frogman, and its own big red tractor. The frog is there to to promote a new event called Return of the Frogman which is certain to be interesting.

And there’s that hearse again although this time it does not mark the parade’s end but only that the end is near. This parade ended with a horsedrawn, steam-powered, fire pump.

More rain was predicted but it was not imminent. I took the shuttle back to my car where I awaited the fireworks. Rain did fall briefly while I waited but it stopped before the show began.

The city’s show began promptly at 10:00 and lasted just under fifteen minutes. Individuals had been setting off fireworks in various nearby locations before the official show and some of those picked up again almost as soon as the big display ended. In addition to those, which were beyond the surrounding trees, someone began launching rockets from an open area right next to the parking lot. It was nothing like the high-flying Loveland-sponsored show we had just seen but definitely not too shabby.

Trip Peek #136 Trip #142 Common Ground on the Hill

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This picture is from my 2017 Common Ground on the Hill trip. I had wanted to attend the Common Ground on the Hill Roots Music & Arts Festival for several years and this was the year that I finally made it. The photo shows the all-musicians-on-deck finale of the showcase concert that took place on the day I reached the festival in Westminster, MD. This was the ninth day of the trip because once I decided to attend Common Ground, I started adding items from my “someday” list to the agenda. Before I reached the pictured concert, I had been pulled to the top of West Virginia’s Bald Knob by a Shay steam-powered locomotive, toured James Madison’s Montpelier, treated to a tour of Richmond, VA, by a friend, celebrated Independence Day in Williamsburg, VA, got rear-ended at a stop light, and sideswiped in a parking lot. Those last two events led to replacing my Subaru once I got home but, despite taking a beating, the 2011 Forester took care of me on what was a very enjoyable trip.

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.

A Secular Season of the Fish

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Partway through last year’s Lenten season, I decided that I no longer wanted to support the Catholic (or any other) Church by patronizing their Friday Fish Fries. I explain that decision at the end of Another Season of the Fish. I still like fish and therefore still like fish fries and I am more than happy to support the many non-religious organizations that take advantage of the season by operating their own piscatorial-powered fundraisers.

Between the first and second weeks of Lent 2024, I discovered a Cincinnati Fish Fry app, similar to the one I recently used for Inaugural Cincinnati Chili Week. My unaudited count of the listed sites identified 54 churches, 16 commercial operations, and 17 others. The “others”, of course, were my targets.

I began the 2024 season at American Legion Post 513 in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, where catfish and cod were both available. I went with the catfish. This tasty meal was $11 plus $2.25 for the Yuengling draft.

The second week’s fish was a bit more expensive than last week’s but the meal included one of the biggest pieces of cod I have ever seen. Everything in the picture plus a piece of chocolate cake was $17 at Cincinnati Shriner’s.

Plans for the evening ruled out a week three fish fry dinner so I decided to do lunch at a place I’ve frequently thought of visiting in the past. This is the McDonald’s location where the first filet-o-fish sandwich was served. It is also Ohio’s first McDonald’s and my only stop at a commercial restaurant this year. Although the location was listed in the Cincinnati Fish Fry app, the app refused to let me check in here. That original filet-o-fish sold for 29¢. My tab was $9.48 but I did get fries and a drink.

My second Americal Legion visit this year was at Post 318 in Anderson Township, Ohio. The pie added $2.50 to the total. Without it, my only baked fish (cod) meal of the season would have been an even $12 including the drink (iced tea).

Week number five had me venturing across a state line to the Wilder Fire Department in Wilder, Kentucky. Fish, shrimp, and chicken were available with no options other than white or rye bread (which I declined). The entire meal, including the green (because it was almost Saint Patrick’s Day) beer and an unphotographed piece of cake with green (because… you know) icing, was $14.

For the second week in a row, I was in Kentucky and drinking Bud Light. Last week’s green Bud was only $1. This week’s yellow Bud was $2. The rest of the meal at Newport Elks Lodge #273 was $13 and it just might be the best of the year.

Lent officially ends on the Thursday preceding Good Friday. Many institutions wrap up their fish fry operations before the Easter weekend is reached but enough don’t to make a seven-week season of fish easily accomplished. I finished my 2024 seven-week run with this $12 meal at Gaily VFW Post 7340. Food is ordered at a central location then hand-delivered so you need to find a seat before ordering to supply a table number. A couple sitting alone welcomed me to their table. A lady in a wheelchair soon occupied the spot to my left and she was immediately greeted by several locals who were delighted to see her. I never did catch her name but learned that she was 100 years old then learned through personal experience just how peppy and friendly she was. She told me she had been coming to the post since its founding in the 1950s. I admitted that this was my first time there but promised to come back to see her next year. Now I have something to look forward to.

Happy Imbolc (Again/Exact/Maybe)

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One of the few details I remember from Tracy Kidder’s 1981 The Soul of a New Machine is the note that one of the engineers left behind when, frustrated by nanosecond timing issues in the computer they were designing, he simply took off. The note read, “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

What a wonderful idea. Problems seem to just naturally appear in dealing with time shorter than a season even when the time in question is much longer than a nanosecond. There is a problem of sorts in simply measuring a season. Something that I must have known but which did not really register with me until recently is that not all seasons are equal. And by seasons, I mean the periods between solstices and equinoxes. A simplified explanation is that Earth moves around the sun in an ellipse rather than a circle and that it travels faster relative to the sun when it is closer to it. I was reminded of this when I tried to calculate the time and date of Imbolc and realized that dividing an exact fourth of a year in half just didn’t work. The actual lengths are approximately 90 days for spring and autumn, 94 days for summer, and 89 days for winter. Yeah, that doesn’t add up to 365 days but throwing in the word “approximately” makes it OK.

When I spoke of calculating the time and date of Imbolc, I meant the point halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox. I suppose I should quit calling it that. Even though Imbolc may have originally been linked to that point, many who celebrate it have more or less attached it to the calendar date February 1. Same thing with Saint Brigid’s Day. Similarly, Candlemas and Groundhog Day have been nailed to February 2 even though they too were once associated more tightly with winter’s midpoint. Of course, even before they were detached from astronomy and attached to calendar dates, these were seen as holidays rather than instants. Back when humans first started recognizing solstices and equinoxes and points halfway between them, they were no doubt happily dealing with no unit of time shorter than a day.

I first wished the world Happy Imbolc in 2016 then repeated it in 2023. Those posts used a photo of a sign at Gobbler’s Knob taken on my only Punxsutawny Phil visit. This time it’s a picture of Howdy Doody and Princess Summerfall Winterspring which I think fits better with all that talk of seasons.

By my calculation, the instant halfway between the most recent winter solstice and the next spring equinox is 10:47 on February 4, 2024. I am not 100% certain that is accurate and I’m not even sure what I should call it if it is. But it’s all I’ve got and, since it is a mere 4 hours and 47 minutes after this blog’s normal weekly posting time of 6:00 AM, I have decided to synchronize this week’s post with that cosmic event.

Happy Winter’s Midpoint! We’ve made it halfway.

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.

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.

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.