I think every schoolchild in Michigan and Ohio has been taught about the Toledo War. You can follow the link to Wikipee if you are interested in the specifics. I am too taaaaaared to report them don’t remember them. I do know that the Great Lake State got the grand prize [wink] because, in an exchange for a rather narrow strip of land (in the grand scheme of things), it got the whole darn Yooperland.

So, today dawned gorgeously.

I didn’t want to do a Death March today but I was kind of hoping that the GG would want to do some kind of junket and I was actually hoping it would be a southward back-highway junket so I was ecstatic when he said, “Wanna go down to O-haaaa-o? Yes! Yes I do. We’re only about an hour above the Ohio border here so it’s a pretty easy trip.

We visited the Blissfield Penguins along the way. I have not seen these penguins before, although the GG thought that I had. There is a short VERY BORING story behind that. Now I have seen them in person and I will not forget that they are in Blissfield (BTW, on our return trip, all five were on the bench.)

The destination I was told about was Berkey, Ohio, but the true destination was Oak Openings Metropark. The North Country Trail goes through Oak Openings and the GG is hot to get his 100 miles on the NCT for 2017. We had a devil of a time finding the actual NCT in that metropark and the pic below is the *only* clear indication that we were anywhere near it. I think we did about three miles today. On or near the NCT. I hope that is acceptable to whoever counts those miles.

I’m not complaining about the lack of adequate signage. There were plenty of well-beaten trails (including horse trails and we even encountered a couple of horses and their riders) but I missed the well-groomed sections of the eastern yooperland NCT with all of those rectangular blue blazes. There are complicated issues surrounding national trails like the NCT and they are not always able to use standard signage and blazes, etc.

After a bit more exploring in the area (Wabash Cannonball rail trail anyone?), we headed back north. We wanted to make sure we found Old State Line Road (the original border between Michigan and Ohio) and here we are. We drove east on it for a couple of miles, then we beamed up to the Planet Ann Arbor. We have so much fun!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2017 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.