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!