Although our plan is to chase the good weather, the reality is that poor weather is going to find us sometimes — especially since we headed south about two weeks later than we probably should have for those warmer temps. Luckily we’re sturdy folk and can tolerate some cold temps.
We left Michigan in cold and sun and arrived at our Hueston Woods State Park campsite in cold and sun. We had a quick easy dinner and made a little fire to chase away the chill. Then the rain started and the temps dropped even more. It rained through the night. We woke to even colder rain and didn’t feel like fighting the elements, so we drove a few miles into Oxford, OH, for breakfast. Then we learned that Oxford, Ohio, is home to Miami University. You can almost always find something interesting to do at a university.
While driving around looking for rainy day activities, we stopped in at the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum, which is part of the University. It’s free to visit and gets you a visitor’s parking pass around campus. Very nice.
Although not overly large, the museum did have a decent number of pieces, with an emphasis on local, modern works of art.
Wandering the art museum was a good way to warm up and feed our minds after breakfast. I stood in front of the above piece for quite a while, enjoying the way it played with my optics, the lines seeming to move a bit and the orange spot seeing to grower brighter and dimmer the longer I looked at it.
Something I found strange (and a bit off-putting) was the way non-American and non-northern European pieces were displayed. The room housing the African, Asian, Greek, and South American works was all the way to the back of the building and felt cramped and dark, quite different from the open, bright, and airy rooms at the front of the museum. And nearly everything was clustered together in small glass cases rather than having any visual ‘breathing room’ around them. Perhaps ancient pieces made primarily of clay, wood, grass, and other natural materials need to be more sheltered from bright or direct light? Perhaps the lights in the cases were just on the fritz and a work order has been put in? I don’t know; I meant to ask.
Heading into the campus proper, we saw a few of these little GrubHub delivery bots cruising around. They even navigated busy roads at pedestrian crossings. The intermittent rain didn’t seem to affect them at all.
After visiting the Hefner Museum of Natural History, an absolute wonder of assorted taxidermy, we wandered the rest of the basement’s hallway and checked out a few of the other specimen rooms in Upham Hall. At the back of the mollusk/shells room, we came across a poor upside down tiger. That was a belly just begging to be rubbed! I ask, how often do you get the chance to see murder paws up close? Yes, we refrained from touching it, knowing that the oils on our hands would be detrimental to the skin and fur in the long run, but it wasn’t easy.
On our way back to the campground, we visited one of the local covered bridges. It’s called the Black Bridge, the former owner’s name, despite never being painted black.
Growing up in West Michigan, we’d learned about the indigenous mound builder tribes that inhabited the Great Lakes region, but we were still surprised to see that the campground had a burial mound at the end of our line of campsites. There wasn’t any information posted about it, and the rain started coming down hard again as we walked the path around it, so I’m not sure if there are more of them nearby or just the one remaining. Someday I hope to see the astrological Serpent Mound in south central Ohio.
The next morning, we heard an early lull in the rain, so we hooked up quickly and drove east toward Louisville, Kentucky, where the weather promised to be dry.
Charlestown State Park is right along the Ohio River, on the Indiana side of the Louisville metro with a nice campground. Since some friends, Shannon and Chris, moved to the metro just a few months ago, it seemed like a good time to visit.
Charlestown State Park is a fairly new state park (1996) for Indiana, on the site of an old ammunition factory, but its hidden gem is an old picnic ‘island’ (peninsula) from the 1800s that had another Resort-style rendition and a name change, Rose Island, in the early 1900s. After a massive flood of the Ohio River in 1937, the park was abandoned and all but forgotten until it reopened to the public in 2011 when a bridge was installed. Nature has reclaimed nearly every inch of the once glamorous summer resort, but a few bits of its history still peak out here and there.
After breakfast in Jeffersonville with Shannon and Chris, we all took a stroll down to the Ohio River. The area clearly learned a painful lesson in 1937. Flood walls like this are everywhere throughout the region.
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