Subject to Change

I’ve finally managed to create a partial photostream of my travels to Columbus, Ohio last year. I was able to use this photo set to talk about some of the things I never had time to blog about. So, you’ll notice that some of the picture comments are quite wordy.

This turned out to be a great way to review everything we were going through in January through April. I hope that I can manage to finish the photostream over the next few months. I’m not paying for Flickr, which means I get to do this at a rate of 100Mb per month.

We enjoyed our experiences. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about them.

Excuse the grainy cell phone image. I was coming back from lunch and spotted the McCain tour bus at the Hilton across the street from my office.

I’m considering stopping over to make an appearance as “Aaron the Drunk and part-time Buckeye.”

This is a picture of how I spent my evening, at the High Banks Metro Park in Columbus, OH. There are a handful of these parks around the Columbus area. The two that I’ve seen so far, High Banks and Sharon Woods, have plenty to offer. The parks are large enough that it’s easy to forget you’re right on the edge of a major city.

We went to Sharon Woods several weeks ago to do some biking. The trail there is paved and relatively flat. Since I was towing Cole and Kelly’s bike doesn’t shift gears that worked out nicely for us.

This week we discovered High Banks, which is on the edge of the Olentangy River. The park has several miles of gravel hiking trails and a viewing platform on the bluff overlooking the river. We hiked to the platform at sunset for a view that reminded me of Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin. Cole tried to feed some deer that let us get within about thirty feet before running off.

The fire places at High Banks are what drew us there last night. We discovered them earlier this week and were looking forward to spending a relaxing evening by the fire. The park has several of these shelters with fire places built in. We found ourselves wishing there was something like this back home.

Of course, building just one park like this in Milwaukee would result in a massive tax increase. Even Columbus has a tax levy dedicated to these parks. Yet, they managed to create these spaces in spite of their property taxes being lower than ours. Other taxes around here are about the same, so I do believe they’re doing more with less. The results, as you see, are impressive.  

Yesterday we scouted the Ohio State Fair. Today we went for real. For most of the day we enjoyed the DNR park, which is spectacular. Even though I’ve always enjoyed the DNR exhibit at the Wisconsin State Fair, what we saw here in Ohio puts our home state to shame.  There’s a mini zoo, with native wild animals like badgers, turkeys, bobcats, and beavers. There’s also a walk-in song bird aviary, a butterfly house, a fishing pond for kids, and other really great kid activities. For older kids there’s an archery range and shooting simulator. What’s a fair without a shooting gallery, anyway?

One of the DNR representatives gave us a temporary “Fish Ohio” tattoo for Cole. It didn’t get applied perfectly, as you can see.

Oh, well. We saw magic shows, jugglers, chain saw sculpting, a cow made out of butter, and a petting zoo. We also met this nice man on stilts.

In all I’d say that Ohio has much more midway and fewer animals at the fair. It’s similar enough to our own fair, though, that last night I found myself thinking that I’d soon be walking home and spending the night in my own bed. We live so close to Wisconsin State Fair park that we often go there in the evening just to eat an unhealthy dinner.This mural for the kids was a great idea! When we spotted it last night I couldn’t wait to bring Cole, so that he could make his mark on the fair.

He did.

Not even Full Throttle energy drink was enough to keep Cole awake after eight hours of activity. He slept through dinner and never made a peep.

Later on I realized how wrong it was that Kelly had to ask me what I was eating.

The Columbus Zoo is open late on Wednesday nights during the summer. As new members of the zoo we’ve been taking advantage this to go after I get home from work. Yesterday, we chatted with a docent who told us about some of the things we can do in the Columbus area. She also told us that the zoo doesn’t shoe its guests out at closing time, like they do at the Milwaukee County Zoo.

As it turned out, this tip came in handy. Our last stop for the night was the aquarium. Cole loves fish. He’ll even tell you if you ask him. This was our way of getting all the energy we could out of his system before bed.

No one was in the building when we arrived, except the zoo worker who was packing up the petting pool. She left and we had the building to ourselves. We sat down in front of the aquarium at watched the fish. Suddenly, there was a loud click and I saw a zookeeper locking the doors to the building with us still inside. When I ran over to make sure he’d seen us he told me not to worry and to take my time.

For the next twenty minutes Cole, Kelly, and I watched the fish with no one else around. The only screaming child was mine and we didn’t have to try and see around anybody. Cole was free to roam without fear that he would disturb anyone else. I know that Kelly and I both really enjoyed those few moments. It was about as peaceful as life can get with a sixteen month old around.

I decided to return the favor on our way out of the building, by cleaning up all the garbage in the area. I figured that it was the least I could do to return the favor.

I’m curious to know why there’s such a different attitude at the Columbus Zoo. Milwaukee closes its buildings early and can’t seem to get people out the gate fast enough. The Columbus Zoo has a waterpark and golf coarse, which makes me suspect that it’s privately owned in some way. Milwaukee County Zoo, I believe, is not. We also learned yesterday that the Columbus Zoo only recently unionized. I hope that doesn’t change the way they operate!

This car was stuck in Fairwood Ave. A few brave (or disturbed) souls pushed it out of there after the rain stopped. The sewer behind it was creating a bubble dome more than a foot high.

There was audio for the following video, but it doesn’t seem to have uploaded. The distorted part of the image is the water beginning to swirl down the drain.

A freak storm hit the area where I work in Columbus today. It was highly localized and hit hard. From the look of the radar it targeted the specific building that I was in! We lost power (except the generators) , radio, and phones.

When the lightning strike killed our computers we were already working late. On the way out to the parking lot someone told us there was three to six inches of water out there. The water was up to the bottom of my bumpers before I even got in, and I had to run through a downpour that must’ve been deep purple on radar.

A coworker and I attempted to find a route home. We drove through several deep puddles before giving up five blocks away and deciding to park our cars on higher ground, back where we came from.

I was too busy trying not to die to get any good video of the storm, but here’s a video of a rescue vehicle plowing through the street and creating a wake. There were cars floating on this street. I also saw sewage shooting up from the flood for a while. People from the neighborhood were playing in the water anyway (ewwww!).

We had to wait a few hours for the water level to drop. It’s good to be dry now!

I heard yesterday that you’re considering putting in a street car route to boost mass transit ridership. I’ve got to tell you that it won’t work. Trust me!!!

I’m from Milwaukee, where our street car is about a decade old now. To be honest, I don’t even know if we’ve got one anymore. It ran from near the UWM campus to the liquor and gay people parts of town. Is this sounding familiar, Columbus?

If memory serves, trolley fare was originally fifty cents. So, it never made any money. One could assume from the artificially low fare that it was never meant to. One must assume then, that the idea behind the trolley was to boost interest in mass transit or perhaps to encourage tourism. Since the trolley typically runs empty and you’ve obviously never heard of it before, I’d say it failed to do either. It’s not even a topic of interest locally, except when our county executive suggests that we’re losing revenue on the service. That’s the only time anyone notices the blasted thing. We spent all that money on specially decorated busses and signage, and got nothing out of it. On the bright side, we didn’t waste taxpayer money installing a rail system for our street car experiment.

Let me ask you something: what sense does it make to operate a trolley car in a modern city? Wouldn’t driving the thing past the giant, electric marquee on High Street spoil the retro image? Look, I’ve been to the German Village. Parts of this town understand that ambience is an all or nothing affair. You can’t just slap a street car in the middle of downtown and expect it to be a success. What’s going to motivate people to ride it? 

I’m strongly advising you against this poor investment. As usual, my consulting fee is half the dollar amount I’ve saved. I’m eagerly awaiting my check.

Hugs and kisses,

Aaron