We crossed into Ohio toward the middle of the day. It was quite hilly and covered in trees. We had a look around Cincinnati. It looked older but well maintained. It had some especially attractive religious buildings:
Plum Street Synagogue
St. Peter in Chains Cathedral
St. Peter in Chains Cathedral
It seemed like a much older city than most of the places we’d been to out west and in the rest of the Midwest. The homes looked older, not as old as our Regency flat in Brighton, but still old enough that I think we are unlikely to live there since one of the reasons we moved was to be somewhere with more modern options. Cincinnati looked like the majority of the houses were old, and therefore, most people that lived there would probably have to chose an older house.
Cincinnati is right on the Ohio Kentucky border, so we decided to nip into Kentucky for lunch. Despite being walkable over a very pedestrian friendly bridge, Kentucky was completely different. I don’t think these people cross that bridge all that often. It was amazing how fast the look of the place and the accents changed. Everyone we heard speaking in Ohio had a very Middle America type accent, while it immediately switched into a full on Southern drawn just across this fairly short bridge in Newport:
A Home in Kentucky
Chris wanted to try KFC in Kentucky to see if it was better even though we hardly ever ate it in the UK – this was my second time having it at all in 15 years or so. It still tastes exactly like it did when I ate it as a kid in Wisconsin. Check out a video of our experience:
After lunch, we continued through Ohio up to Dayton. We drove around to get a feel for it. It wasn’t a bad little city, but nothing really popped for us, so we decided to go on to Columbus. After such a bad night in Indiana, we read dozens of reviews before picking a place to stay, and our research paid off! We can highly recommend the Red Roof Inn in Worthington, a suburb of Columbus. It was clean and in a location that felt both safe and useful in terms of the amenities and proximity to Columbus proper. I also prefer real motels to the ones that are just cheap hotels. It is so much easier to unload everything when you have to do it this often when you can just pull right up to your door. This turned out to be especially useful given we had some rainy weather.