Saturday was the last full day of our trip. We began the day with a little adventure which requires some explanation.
For as long as I've known her, Terry has had a desire to find a grassy riverbank. She says she wants to sit on a grassy riverbank that slopes down to the water's edge, where she can hear the rippling of the water, under a sky with puffy white clouds, eating ham sandwiches. Sounds romantic, doesn't it?
The problem is, finding a grassy riverbank that slopes down to the water is harder than you might think. Living here in Los Angeles, where rivers have concrete walls, is part of the problem. But even when we travel, I could never find the kind of grassy riverbank she was looking for. Either there'd be trees right down to the waterline, or rocks, or sand, or marsh... everything but grass.
Well, one day, as we drove through Mount Vernon, I spotted what Terry was looking for. A grassy riverbank, on the Kokosing River, which flows through Mount Vernon. (The Kokosing River eventually empties into the Walhonding River, which empties into the Muskingum River, which empties into the Ohio River, which empties into the Mississippi River, which you may have heard of... but I digress).
So Saturday morning, we picked up a couple of ham sandwiches, took a couple of large bath towels from our room (in lieu of a picnic blanket, which we didn't have one of), and ate them on the grassy riverbank:
Terry said it was almost perfect - the only problem was that she couldn't hear the river. So I'm still looking for a grassy riverbank, this time by a somewhat noisier river.
As we walked back to our car (we were out behind a disused railway station), we passed a small house, and I noticed a plaque on it. It turned out to be the childhood home of Daniel Decatur Emmett (w), a nineteenth-century songwriter and entertainer, best known for having written the song "Dixie," although there seems to be some doubt whether he actually wrote it.
We then drove to the town of Coshocton, where we took a canal boat ride - right around the corner from Roscoe Village.
The Canal boat (not an original, but a faithful reproduction)
The horses that towed the boat
The steersman
I was interested to note that the steersman turned the rudder by leaning on the lever and pushing it with his butt.
The green in the water comes from algae, not industrial waste.
On the ride (which only went for about half a mile), the canal boat's "captain" regaled us with stories of Ohio's canal era - again, going over some of the same ground that we had already heard about at Roscoe on Monday, and on the train ride on Friday.
We got hung up at one point, and had to wait while the captain and the crew cleared some fallen bushes off of the towpath:
And eventually we reached a spot where the canal widened out, allowing the boat to turn around and head back:
That evening, we drove back to Pataskala to have dinner at Linda's house, with Bob and Jean and Trudy. And then we went back to Apple Valley and packed up. The next morning, we drove back to Akron and caught our flight home.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable trip, as well as educational. As I mentioned to Terry, I could never live like the Amish (no Internet??? Forget it!!), but I have a lot of respect for their commitment to their way of life, as well as their sense of community - something in short supply here in the big city.