Likely Story: Ohio

We decided to hire a car and do a bit of a road trip to visit some friends and do a bit of camping and are discovering that this is a big and spectacular country with amazing forests and scenery. The old owners of Sunflower now live in Ripley Ohio so we of course had to catch up with them and see how they are. We left on the worst possible day, tropical storm "Julia" had just passed over us the night before and was heading north the way we were also headed and after driving for 7 hours we finally passed through it into clear skies we ended up in a State National Park on Lake Murray where we camped in a beautiful spot for a couple of nights and just hung out BBQing, walking and trying to catch a fish.

From there we drove up through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and then into Ohio over some beautiful mountains, farmland and forest, everything is so lush and green and all tuned into the local radio stations that only seem to play country and western which I have to say slowly drives me nuts but definitely sets the scene. Was great to see Al and Beth in Ripley, very nice old rustic little town on the river that is the border for Kentucky. They couldn't have made us more welcome and showed us around their area and introduced us to their friends was a great 3 days, thank you so much! One of the highlights for me was going to a shrimp harvest. They have these fresh water shrimps in ponds on a farm and harvest them at the end of summer draining the pond completely. It's a big day with a lot of the locals coming down to help and buy and I reckon they would have got close to getting a ton of shrimp from the one pond as well as a heap of frogs they collect to eat and a little turtle they release somewhere else, the kids were having a blast anyway. Al also showed us his giant pumpkin he has been growing the last few months of the summer! He says it's about 750 pounds! Another very interesting thing was the tobacco fields which we had never seen, all in all it was a busy few days😀

Now we are heading of camping again and then onto seeing some other friends in North Carolina