In case there are any long-lost relatives following our story through this blog, see the page at right labelled “Photo Shoot Proofs”.
The link will only be good through July 2010.
Grandma and I took the GC to see Toy Story 3 today. I found it rather dark and intense for a children’s movie; “Babe” or “Milo and Otis” it ain’t. The GC was visibly upset during some of the more disturbing scenes.
And the theme of the film is drawn directly from today’s news stories: after years of faithful service, Woody and Buzz get laid off. They sign up with an outplacement service which turns out to be a total rip-off: they are even physically assaulted. When they try to leave their new job, they find out they cannot; probably because they couldn’t repay the service fees due to predatory lending practices. But they finally get offshored and are happy, at least when the movie ends.
Today was a low-cost, but fun-filled day of activities. There is no such thing as a free lunch; we had to burn some gas driving around, and some people would say our consequent carbon footprint was yet another cost, but still we did the day on the cheap.
First stop was Feeders Supply. A great place for some free entertainment (well, we did buy some cat food). The Humane Society maintains a satellite facility there, so GC got to see the dogs and cats and kittens available for adoption. And Feeders had bunny rabbits and birds and gerbils and hamsters and lizards and all kinds of fish for sale. The hamsters ran around on their little wheel, and the lizards ate crickets. There was also a lady in the self-serve pet wash grooming her dog. All in all, at least a half hour of entertainment.
Then we went to Locust Grove, the historical mansion of one of the early families of Louisville. They had just recently finished a major renovation and had a free day today. There were reenactors playing various characters from early eighteenth century Louisville and the renovation of the mansion was stunning. They have done so much with the site since we moved here four years ago. All the ladies playing period characters wore long dresses and held fancy fans. GC was taken by the fans, and we got one at the gift shop.
We ended up at the public library (always free), and the Louisville Beekeepers Association was there with a substantial exhibit. GC got to see the Queen Bee, which thrilled her for some reason. We also got to play on the library computers, get a summer reading club bag, and check out some videos.
A great low cost day of activities!
Sitting on the elephant sculpture
This last week GC and I have been collecting donations for the Epilepsy Foundation Fund Drive. This morning, the foundation had their collection and thank you walk at the Louisville Zoo. GC enjoyed this quite a bit. We were disappointed that the rhinoceroses were not on display today, but they do have a high tech sprayground there and we took full advantage of that.
It has been particularly hot here the last few days, and there was some real evidence of this in the Kroger frozen food aisle this morning. They had advertised store brand ice cream sandwiches on sale, and since I had to go and pick up a few other items for work, I figured I’d toss a box of them in the cart.
But when I got to the ice cream freezer, I saw something I had never seen before. The end of the freezer that held the expensive ice cream was still fairly well stocked, but the opposite end, where they keep the “value” ice cream, was completely empty. Not a pint or push-up anywhere. I told my wife all you could see were claw marks and the bodies of the slow.
The suburban subdivision that we live in, as well as several of the surrounding ones, are all built on the former grounds of a huge horse plantation. Amazingly enough, the original plantation mansion still stands in the middle of the neighborhood, a few blocks from our house; it is now a bed and breakfast. Even more amazingly, parts of the mansion date back over two hundred years to the earliest days of Kentucky (well, as least as the white English settlers measure it). Today they held a special historical festival there. Unfortunately, although the camera went through all the motions of taking the pictures of the mansion, the antique doorbell, the reenactors dressed up as soldiers, the cannon, and everything else, it didn’t store any of the images. So you’ll have to take our word that it was pretty cool.
Pebble Bug
GC and I made a craft item today: a “pebble bug”. We took a smooth rock from the neighbor’s driveway when they were not looking, and painted it and stuck on some pipe cleaner.
Our last day in the Cincinnati-Covington-Newport-Erlanger-Florence-Etc-Etc-Etc area. We had made very good use of the “Kids Eat Free” promotion at the Holiday Inn; I can definitely recommend that.
We spent the morning swimming in the hotel pool and then packed up the car. While we waited on grandma to finish up her class, we went to the mall. They had a nice play area there, and a fancy carousel.
It’s Sunday and we finally made it into Ohio for the first time (technically, we might have been in Ohio when the ferry made landfall the other night, but I’m not sure). We visited the Krohn conservatory in Eden park, a must-see if you are visiting Cincinnati. The conservatory has a stunning garden of tropicals with an indoor waterfall as well as several other lush indoor gardens.
Too bad grandma was in a class all day; she would have certainly loved to see this.
As an extra bonus, while we were there, we saw the special “butterflies of Japan” exhibit. After visiting the children’s craft area (where we made this butterfly mask), GC and I went into a section of the conservatory where there were thousands and thousands of butterflies flying freely about. Truly a stunning display.
Several of them would alight on our fingers and shoulders. GC was captivated. If you go, go early; we arrived shortly after opening, and it was fairly crowded already. it was queuing up by the time we left.
After we left the conservatory, we drove around the park to the river outlook. At this point you can really see how the river has cut its valley out of the rock. Grandpa found this interesting. GC found it more interesting that you can also see a lot of ducks in the nearby pond. After chasing the ducks around for about fifteen minutes, we left the park and tried to find the children’s museum. It is not intuitively obvious how to get to the museum from the park and I was certainly glad that we were driving around on Sunday afternoon and not trying to dodge weekday traffic. I also determined that as nice a place as Cincinnati is to visit in the summer, I would not want to have to navigate those hills in the winter.
We did eventually find the museum center; it is carved out of the old Union Station, and makes an impressive sight as you drive up to it. Unfortunately, when we arrived, grandpa discovered that he had left all his money in his other pants back in the hotel room. GC took it well, and patiently endured the trip back into Kentucky, to the hotel, and back to the museum.
There are several museums in the old train terminal; we only did the Children’s. That was enough. I don’t know if GC learned much, but she certainly had a lot of fun. There was the water works (like the one in Louisville), and there was a huge jungle gym-like area made up like a series of tree houses in the woods (it was called “The Woods”).
Up and down and through tunnels and slides it went on for about an hour. There was one minor crisis when GC would not come down from the top level because she had lost one of her shoes. Eventually, though, the shoe was found, and the crisis passed.
On the way out of the museum, we had this souvenir photo made.
Outside the Aquarium
Now, this morning we all headed into Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati proper to visit the famed Newport Aquarium. The Aquarium is not cheap, but it is quite an engineering feat.
We saw a lot of fish. A lot. We also saw eels, and a giant octopus, and we visited the frog bog where we made a lot of frog sounds. The jellyfish room was the most fascinating to grandpa, although GC wasn’t very impressed. We fed the lorikeets in the rainforest exhibit (Lorikeets? In an aquarium? Bear in mind that they get an extra $2 out of you.) The “World rivers” exhibit showed a variety of fish from all over the world (the Mekong was particularly interesting).
The Amazon river exhibit is a thirty-foot long tunnel inside of a 117,000 gallon tank that allows the fish to glide so closely and clearly that you think you can just reach out and grab them. But the high point of the aquarium is the eighty-five foot tunnel through 185,000 gallons of water filled with sharks, rays, and reef fish. Here we saw sharks as close as we would ever want to and maybe even closer. After you leave the shark tank, you can visit a little “petting tank” where you can pet small sharks as they swim by. Finally, there is the penguin exhibit, which makes all the kids laugh. It is sponsored by Kroger (which is headquartered in Cincinnati). While we were watching the penguins dart around, what I suppose you would call the penguin pen maintenance person came out to spray the guano off the rocks. 
“Four years of studying zoology,” I thought, “on your way to your Masters degree, and this is what you get to do all summer.”
The "Frog Bog"
I don’t know that the aquarium is the kind of place that you would want to visit every year, but it’s worth at least one trip if you’re in the Cincinnati area.
After lunch, we drove down to Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. We had seen it featured on “Kentucky Life” (our favorite TV show), but I have to say that a trip to Rabbit Hash is more about the journey than the destination. It is a pretty drive through the rural hills and dales of the Ohio River valley and you do end up at the Rabbit Hash general store. The store is an old-fashioned conglomeration of everyday items and old junk, but it is all reasonably priced.
GC and Biker
On the way back, we drove right by the Creation Museum; it was only about ten minutes from the hotel, but we did not stop.
This morning we visited Big Bone Lick State Park. In Texas, the refrain is “everything is bigger in Texas”. It seems that in Kentucky the refrain is “it started/happened here first”; my wife and I see this attitude all the time on Kentucky Life, and joke about it regularly. So when I pulled into the entrance of Big Bone Lick State Park, and saw that the sign out front proclaimed it to be “the birthplace of American Paleontology”, I thought Here We Go Again. But, as usual, there is some evidence to lend credence to this claim. Turns out that in pre-Revolutionary times, both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson studied prehistoric bone samples from this area.
If you get to the park first thing in the morning, you can get a good view of the bison herd. The park ranger told us that later on in the day the bison move way up the hill and are much harder to see. But the buffalo are fed early in the morning and you can get quite close to them; we were close enough to hear them chewing. There were even two baby buffalo, which, of course, the grandchild found absolutely enchanting. And she was intrigued by the animal bones and teeth and Indian artifacts in the museum, surprisingly so; or at least I thought for a four year old.
That evening after dinner, the two of us were looking for something to do. There was a ferry across the Ohio River nearby that my wife and I had seen featured on Kentucky Life. So I decided to take GC1 down to watch it go back and forth.
The road to the ferry was the steepest and narrowest road I had driven outside of the Rocky Mountains. The speed limit sign said 35, which was hilarious, as even in the BMW I never made it over 15 and that was on the few straight stretches. The car was angled down so acutely that the oil level warning came on (don’t they have mountains in Germany? You would think that they had allowed for a situation like this).
We eventually arrived at the riverbank and watched the cars get on, go across, and get off. When the ferry started back, I asked the GC if she wanted to ride on the boat. “No, I’m scared,” she said, and I said that was OK. But by the time the ferry bumped up to the shoreline she had changed her mind and we walked down behind the cars and onto the ferry.
The usual crossing fee for a car was $4. But we were on foot. The old man collecting money looked at us for a moment, then asked if we wanted a round trip. I said Yes, and he said One Dollar. Such a deal.
Then, of course, we had to go back up the same road on the same hill to get back to the hotel. It’s a good thing that grandma did not go along with us, as she does not care for steep roads, narrow roads, nor ferries for that matter, in the least.
