"A point just beyond the Franklin County line, to the south of Canal Winchester"

Normally, it would be hardly surprising that my first post, beyond the introduction of this blog, is about a trip. But travel has hardly been prevalent in this past pandemic year -- unless you count walks around the block, which don't seem worth recounting. It used to be, when I looked at my calendar, it was filled with lots of weekend trip reminders. Now, when I look back a year ago, it's filled with Zoom happy hours (below) and aspirational but ultimately postponed or cancelled events, including a cousin's wedding, a spring break in Maine, and a concert of a lifetime. 

 

With the exception of some road trips within friend and family bubbles in Ohio, to Mansfield (top left) and Toledo (top right), travel became the equivalent of regular escapes to the outdoors for biking, hiking, and canoeing (which I plan to detail eventually). It wasn't until the end of July that I took what I would consider a "real" vacation: a few days in a beach house on the Eastern Shore, tacked on to the tail end of a work detail in DC. We hit the sand at Assateague State Park and the boardwalk at Ocean City, but mostly, I balanced babies on my hip and drinks in my hand (bottom).

 

For the next four months, I stuck within Ohio confines. Around Thanksgiving, I ventured beyond the Buckeye borders for the first of what would become two moving hauls. Despite my best efforts, I could not squeeze all my stuff in the back of an SUV, so we scheduled a second trip for just after Christmas. This time, we didn't want to make it a straight out and back, so we decided to stop for a night. We picked Winchester, Virginia, because I was familiar with its pedestrian-friendly historical center from when I stayed there for some federal government training -- and I discovered there were now four breweries within walking distance of downtown. 

We managed to hit three of the four: Alsatian Brewing, where we had delicious pizza from the Italian place downstairs; Winchester Brew Works, where we picked up some crowlers as souvenirs; and Broken Window Brewing Company, where we basically wanted to become regulars. The timing just didn't work out to visit Escutcheon Brewing Co., as it is closed on Mondays, but we managed to hit two other breweries nearby: Front Royal Brewing Company and Backroom Brewery.  

The last two breweries were our reward for a strenuous hike we took at Sky Meadows State Park (top left). We ended up doing a loop of about 6 miles, way more than planned, but the gorgeous weather inspired us to be intrepid. To be honest, most of the challenge came at the beginning, which was a steep uphill to the Piedmont Memorial Overlook (top right). After a short stint on the Appalachian Trail (bottom left), we trickled back down alongside Gap Run to the farmhouse (bottom right). 

 

 

But in some ways, the biggest accomplishment of the trip was the very end because, with my DC apartment completely devoid of my belongings and me, it meant I had officially moved to Ohio. Then a few months later, just like that hike in Virginia, my resettlement in Ohio became a bigger adventure than initially planned. I crossed something off my bucket list with the biggest adulting of my life: We bought a house. With a yard. And a barn. And all the hardwood floors, tiled fireplace, and decorative glass charm a 100-year-old home can offer.

But this post is supposed to be about travel, right? Metaphorically at least, it's been a long road to arrive at this destination. And there's even a bit of fiction-like symbolism. I have made my home in Canal Winchester, which was named after that very Winchester where we stopped during the second moving trip (left). When Reuben Dove established the Ohio village almost 200 years ago, he named it after his father Henry's Virginia hometown. In 1841, when the post office opened, the name was officially changed to Canal Winchester, to distinguish it from the many other Winchesters in the state by highlighting the Ohio & Erie Canal running through it. The canal is long gone, but the town continued to grow, as a railroad and then a highway replaced the waterway as the main transport option. Before I felt comfortable traveling freely, I frequently passed on walks and runs a park owned by the Canal Winchester Area History Society, a complex that includes a train depot, a grain elevator, and a schoolhouse (right). 

 

On those short jaunts, I didn't know that one day I would be making the long trek from Winchester to Canal Winchester -- as the Doves did, becoming the area's first residents. As one of the city's most recent residents, I now realize that this move, as I imagine it was for them, just might be one of the biggest journeys of my lifetime. 

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Prosser, Charles S. “The Disconformity between the Bedford and Berea Formations in Central Ohio.” The Journal of Geology, vol. 20, no. 7, 1912, pp. 585–604. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30060735. Accessed 7 May 2021.