A quick trip to Dayton, Ohio

Our general rule is not to be as far north as Ohio until all chance of snow and cold weather has disappeared, but we made an exception in this case.  Our youngest daughter. Katie, completed her PhD program last fall at the Air Force Institute of Technology and moved to her next assignment in Texas.  The school has only one graduation ceremony a year-in March.  She decided to attend the ceremony.  We have yet to miss a family college graduation and we did not want this to be the first, so we made our version of a quick dash north. All together it took us nine days total.

On the way north we stopped at three campgrounds.  The last one was just north of Cincinnati, at Caesars State Park.  It turned out that it was not open officially until 4 April, but a nice young lady who happened to be organizing the entrance shack told us we were welcome to stay in any of the first three loops, since these had been prepared for the opening.  We drove around the loops and finally settled on a spot, but since it was already getting dark, it was-well-a bit spooky.  We were the only ones in the loop and one trailer in another loop out of a total of almost 300 sites.  We were already getting use to the cold and the forecast for this stop was for temps in the low 20's.  We took a short walk around the loop and noticed that there were a lot of vultures circling the area.  As we headed back to the motorhome, we spotted around 15 or so vultures rising from the tree line in front of us and heading our way.  They flew directly over the road and were down to around 20 feet when they went over head.  Since it was nearly dark, we decided it would not be unseemly if we headed back to the motorhome.  It felt a little bit like the beginning of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

We arrived in Dayton on a Tuesday and Wednesday we picked up Katie at the airport.  The temperatures were going to be in the high teens to low 20's overnight. We found the windows iced up in the morning.

The ceremony was at the National Museum of the Air Force, which is a fantastic place to visit with a great price of free.  The Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, was the guest of honor and took part in the ceremony.  It was a very nice ceremony and we had a great view since we were seated as Distinguished guests-go figure.

It took another three days to return home and we finally hit warm weather when we arrived at Cave City, KY.  We were so happy to be warm again, we drove up Mammoth Cave NP, just to walk a few trails and visit the gift shop.  It was a good thing we did not plan on one of the cave tours as they were all sold out. The area was jammed with what we assumed were spring break folks.