Odds and ends to finish our Ohio trip.....

I'm putting the last few photos from our trip in this post so I can move on to things here at home again.I had to take one shot of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. My father got a 2 year engineering/surveyor degree from there in the early 1920's. He later finished up at George Washington University in D.C. He often talked about his years there and wrote about them in the book he wrote for us kids.
These steps lead up to the cemeteries and nature walk that now exist at the Ridges, which was the Athens State Asylum for the Insane at one time. We had time to kill before going to the quilt show across the street, so we climbed the stairs to hike a bit. If you look up Ridges in Athens, Ohio on the Internet you find all sorts of stuff about the grounds and cemeteries being haunted and scary stuff about what the Insane Asylum used to be like (probably not much different from any other Insane Asylum of that decade). I searched for mention of it in my dad's book and came up with the following:
"On the opposite side of the Hocking River was the Athens State Asylum for the Insane. The standard joke was that it was hard to tell the two institutional groups apart. We did spend a lot of our leisure time in hiking over on the Asylum grounds. We also would go over at night and sneak into the free movies for the inmates. Many of the inmates were quite harmless and were allowed to roam freely even on our side of the river. We even got to know some of them on a personal sort of basis. There was "Crazy Mary" who was musically inclined and would wander around trying to sing in a hoarse screechy voice while waving a stick to conduct her imaginary choir. Then there was old "Fine and Dandy". He was always happy and when the students would greet him and inquire as to how things were going his invariable answer was, "Fine and Dandy, boys, just fine and dandy". he was genuinely missed when he passed away."

The nature trail leads through the cemeteries or around them and across some meadows. We didn't hike the whole way. We saw a deer go bounding across one end of the cemetery and I saw many birds up in the trees around the edges.

The stones are numbered rather than having names.

Many shell-shocked war veterans ended up here. This grave was for a Spanish American War veteran.

A web on the grass.

A flower I didn't recognize. (Verbascum?)

A Waxwing high in a tree.

Earlier that morning, we hiked at Marie J. desonier State Nature Preserve, which took us longer to find than the time we spent hiking it! It was a beautiful serene place with an easy trail to walk.

We could hear birds all around us, but I could never seem to locate them to take photos.

One pretty moth....not very well photographed.

I liked the way the grasses looked along the stream bed here.

Mike took this shot of a wren on the bridge railing.

I cannot remember where this covered bridge was. I think we saw it while looking for quilt barns in the Athens area while heading out of town.

Very nice, but it looked rather new....perhaps rebuilt.

A nice view as you exit. It had no windows to look down on the river below.

Our last stop of the trip was at the Smith-Berry Winery.

Mike liked it enough to buy a couple bottles to bring home :-)

I liked their lovely garden area....and very friendly red dog.

A view of the sitting area under the flowering vines.

Close up of the flowers.

This is out of order. This statue was in Zanesville at the Visitors Center. It honors an artist who had lived there....Karl Kappes and is created by another local artist known for his bronzes.....Alan Cottrill....who has a studio in the city.

That is all of Ohio for this trip. I saw so many small towns that looked interesting and lovely scenery everywhere.....just not enough time on this trip to see or do it all. I hope we go back sometime.