My brother Shannon last came out to visit us in Ohio about three years ago. I immediately put him to work for three days helping me put a new roof on the house. They were long, hot days, and for some reason he has stayed away for three years. Odd.
He finally made his triumphant return to Ohio on Friday when he flew into my favorite convenient airport, CAK (Akron-Canton). We met him with no problems and took him home, where we could plan our assault on fun. Shannon had told me he expected only two things – he had better see lots of rocks on hiking trails, and he had better eat ice cream at Handel’s. That helped get Friday’s plan in order – we took him forty-five minutes away to Nelson Ledges State park, my favorite park in Ohio for impressive rock formations.
We chatted the whole way out to the park, and found it with no issues thanks to the handy little GPS. We started into the park, which is modest-looking enough at first, and we went right, heading toward the waterfalls. The rock formations emerge suddenly out of the trees, and Shannon started tromping about them, investigating little side trails and such. He was impressed with the height and beauty of the falls, even though the volume of water is low. Then I took him to the “big guns” – the red trail.
There are four trails at Nelson Ledges, and each is (somewhat) marked by different colored blazes. The red trail is the most difficult and leads over, under, and through many rock formations. Shannon finally had to admit he was impressed, especially when the three of us went through a new-to-all-of-us crack in the rock that was a long and very narrow squeeze, but still officially part of the red trail. We made our way down into rock formations that actually had cool breezes blowing out of them because of the cave-like temperatures in them. We made our way back from the end of the red trail via the blue trail, which was easier, but still interesting (although it did give rise to the derogatory comment of “That’s so blue trail!” by me and Shannon). It was a great outing.
On the way to the park, I had noticed lines in the road that looked like buggy tracks, so I mentioned there must be Amish nearby. That made Mer remember that Mary Yoder’s Amish Restaurant should be close by, and once again our little GPS came in handy – it found the restaurant on the “search” feature, and so we went there for supper. Shannon is a vegetarian, so his options were sort of limited, but he had a veggie-burger and all was well. We all had pretty giant pieces of pie for dessert, and we headed home. Day One made up some small ground in erasing the memory of roofing the house.