We left Dundee, Michigan and headed back to Ohio, Dayton to be exact. I am riding along on Interstate 75 and we are talking and I look up and there is a sign that the next exit is for the town of Anna. Anna! We can’t miss that, so Larry takes the exit and we park by the city sign of Anna. He is taking pictures and cars are driving by and I am thinking to myself… they must know my name is Anna. I bet this happens quite a bit. Then a woman yells out of her SUV, “Is your name Anna?!?” I say “Yes!” and she says laughing, “Yeah, that happens around here!” So there you go. That was MY excitement for this day of the road trip.

After we got ourselves back on the freeway and had calmed down from the town of Anna excitement, we decided to head to America’s Packard Museum in Dayton before checking into our hotel. This place was really cool, and Dad, you would love it! The museum is in an old showroom and shop where they used to sell and service Packards. They have the largest public collection of Packards in the world. We wandered around there and looked at the cars while the guy who worked there told us stories and background about many of them.

After checking into our hotel, we had some ideas of what we were going to do in Dayton, but upon searching a bit more, we found out that Dayton is home to not only the Wright Brothers, but many other inventors. In fact, at the turn of the century, they had more patents per capita of their 80,000 residents than any other city in the world. What else was invented here besides airplanes? Electric ignition systems for cars, spark plugs, automatic transmission, four-wheel brakes, electric cash registers, Freon, ice cube trays, stepladders, pull tabs on cans, just to name a few. We had our museum work cut out for us. We went to the Wright Brothers Museum and bike shop where they built and sold bikes, and also where the decision was made to try to build an airplane. Next we went to another collection of museums called Carillon Historical Park, which had a lot more about the Wright Brothers, along with information and displays about Dayton’s many other inventions.

That all led us to the first airport, where Wilbur and Orville did many many test runs with their airplanes. They had first gone to Kitty Hawk in North Carolina to test their gliders because it had good wind, it was out of the way so no one bothered them, and there was sand for soft landings. But they eventually needed something closer to home, so they used a big grassy field, which today, is still a big grassy field.

Saturday we drove to Cincinnati and went to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. This was also very close to Great American Ball Park, where the Cincinnati Reds play baseball, so we checked that out too. Not many pictures from the Underground Railroad Museum. But it was interesting and reinforced what we had learned at the other slavery/civil rights stops we’ve made. This also put us just across the Ohio River from Kentucky – which I will cover on my next post!

When we talked about a Michigan stop, Larry and I had decided to go to Ann Arbor. We had driven through once before but hadn’t stopped there. It looked like a neat town, and of course University of Michigan and Michigan Stadium are there, too! It was fun to see the students getting ready for graduation, taking pictures and walking around in caps and gowns. Since the graduation was going to be held in the stadium, tours were not being given. But we still got a few pictures.

We spent the night in a little suburb of Ann Arbor, called Dundee. It turned out to be a nice place with a pretty park and a waterfall where Larry took a nice walk and I read my book. You all know I don’t love walking … and I did work out on the elliptical earlier, so I was able to excuse myself without feeling guilty about it. 🙂

When we left Niagara Falls Monday morning, we had a pretty strict timeline to follow. Classic MINI outside of Cleveland was expecting us at 1:00. We have put over 10,000 miles on the MINI and it was due for an oil change. Classic MINI was great! While we had a little picnic in their waiting room and used their wifi, they got the MINI’s oil changed, fluids topped off, tires rotated, and even washed and vacuumed. We’re good to go again! On to Cleveland!

The next morning we were off to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was fun to go through it and have some overlap of things we had already seen, like Elvis’ story and Graceland. And the recording studios that we visited down south.

After staying in Ohio for 2 nights, we are moving on to Michigan for 1 night, then returning to Ohio again, that’s why this is only part 1. But on the way to Michigan, we stopped at the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio. There we learned that there were many more shipwrecks besides the Edmund Fitzgerald. 😉 We also saw interesting exhibits about the history of the Great Lakes. And while in Toledo there must be a stop at the Mud Hens (AAA affiliates to the Detroit Tigers) stadium. I guess we didn’t look too crazy because they actually let us in to take some pictures of the field!

As I said above, Michigan will be next, but there will be more Ohio content once we go back.

We left Burlington, Vermont bright and early in the morning to go all the way to Niagara Falls – but before we got to Niagara Falls, we were going to make a side trip to LeRoy, New York where we heard there is a JELL-O museum! Yes, a whole museum about JELL-O! JELL-O was invented in LeRoy and all JELL-O was manufactured there until 1964, when they moved it to Dover, Delaware. The old building is still there in LeRoy and we were asking the museum worker there how much that impacted the town. She said there were a lot of people in the town that had to choose whether they were moving to Dover or staying in LeRoy. She was in Kindergarten at the time but remembers it clearly. Mostly because her best friend’s family was one of the families that moved to Dover so she was sad.

We got to Niagara Falls in time to get some pictures while it was still light. We had originally planned to stay two nights at the falls, but the spreadsheet got adjusted before we left when we added a night in Camden, Maine. We didn’t have much time there, but we made the most of it!

After leaving Polly’s Pancake Parlor stuffed with pancakes, we started making our way towards Vermont. A new state for me! We crossed into Vermont and headed north. We were fairly close to the Canadian border, and Larry had read about the town of Derby Line, and that their library is on the international border. Half of the library is in Derby Line, VT, US, and the other half is in Stanstead, Quebec, Cananda. We also read that tours of the building were on hold due to COVID and in fact it was closed to anyone who was not a member of the library. But as you may have noticed, we are drawn to borders and state lines, and having a building that straddles one?! Exciting! We had to go check it out!

We then headed back south to Burlington, where we were going to spend two nights. But first we wanted to make a few stops. We were going through the town of Stowe, Vermont where the von Trapp family settled after escaping the Nazi’s in 1938. They toured the world singing, but eventually came back to Stowe to run a lodge. The lodge is still there and is run by the von Trapp family, so we wanted to at least drive by it.

Who goes to Vermont without a Ben & Jerry’s stop? Not us! Unfortunately, they don’t have the factory tour up and running again yet, but the scoop shop was open for business!

The next morning, we decided to go see Middlebury College, which is about 45 minutes from Burlington. Our nephew graduated from there 5 years ago, so we were way too late to have Andrew give us a tour – but we had heard him speak highly of it and wanted to take a look. But first… well, we needed to do laundry. No friends or family visits for a few weeks, and no facilities in our recent or near future hotels. The town of Middlebury treated us well to a nice big laundromat where we spent the morning doing laundry. Then we went to Middlebury College, which was impressive, even on the cold gray day we were there.

While in Burlington we enjoyed having dinner and doing some shopping on Church Street, the nice shopping and entertainment district downtown.

When we were in Maine, we reached our furthest point east, and now it is time to head west again, toward home! And as I mentioned before, we were returning to New Hampshire for one night. We had been up Mt. Washington a couple of years ago on the cog railway but had not spent much time there. We had put Bretton Woods on the list of places we wanted to return to. Those of you with better history knowledge than me know about the Bretton Woods Monetary Conference that occurred there during World War II. It was where the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created. The room where the conference went down is still there in the hotel, which opened in 1902. It’s a pretty neat historical room.

When we did our long day of driving through multiple states, we were very grateful that it was a beautiful sunny day. According to our weather app rain was coming. Lots of rain. Wind, too. That was OK though because we knew we had a nice hotel room in Camden, Maine waiting for us, and we were wanting a day that we were able to just relax and not feel like we had to do anything. Sure enough we heard the wind start Monday night and Tuesday morning woke up to heavy rain. The wind and rain lasted into the early afternoon, but by the time we were walking to dinner, the clouds were clearing and there were small sun breaks. We spent Tuesday morning hanging out in our room and reading. By lunchtime we decided to venture out and drive to Belfast, about a 30 minute drive north of Camden. We had been told about a restaurant there that had very good lobster. We thought why not take a drive? We did, and it was a funky place … but we did get lobster and it was very good.

Wednesday morning we woke up to a bright sunny day. Since we wanted to do some sightseeing and shopping, that worked out well for us. Camden is such a picturesque little town, and the coast of Maine is so rugged! We spent part of the morning reworking some of the spreadsheet. Spoiler alert — we are not going back to Louisville. We felt like we did everything there in one day with Carly and Sam, and that we’d seen the city. We still need to get the car to Kentucky — you’ll have to see how that all works out. 🙂

We then went out for a walk – and I was able to get in to get my hair cut. OK, and colored too. Who am I kidding? But after that, we finally got to do some shopping at the cute shops. Many of them are still closed for the season, but there were enough open that it was a fun stroll.

Now that we’ve had some time here in Camden, we are ready for the next destination, which is Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.

I hesitate to put New Hampshire in the blog right here, but we did buy a bottle of water at the welcome center rest stop — so I guess officially this is our 27th state. But we will be back and spend the night at Mt. Washington in New Hampshire later this week. Stay tuned for better information and pictures.

Onward we went to Massachusetts. Along with our minimum state criteria of getting out of the car and engaging in commerce, we really try to see something in the state too. This time we found Colonel George Ward’s grave in Worcester. Our neighborhood and street are named in his honor. We also had lunch in Massachusetts so it’s official. 🙂

State #25 – halfway through our 50 states in a MINI quest! From Connecticut we drove into Rhode Island. We scaled the highest peak in the state and bought a full tank of gas. We took the back roads through Rhode Island, but it is so small, we weren’t in the state very long.