Final Thoughts on Ohio

So we have left Ohio, but there are a few final thoughts I had about it.  Up until now I don't think I mentioned one of the things I found most interesting there.  As we were leaving the Northern part earlier in the month, someone asked us where we were headed and we said Cambridge.  He said "Boy I hope you have a reservation, campsites are tough to get down there."  We did have a reservation so we were ok, but when we got there, it wasn't actually campers that filled the campgrounds.  Southern Ohio is filled with oil fields and all these people are coming in to work on them.  It was amazing - everywhere you looked there were oil pumps.  Some of them you could tell were quite old and no longer in working condition, but others were still going.  Years ago there was a ton of oil and the towns were booming - then it all seemed to be gone, and sadly, you could see these towns that once thrived were now struggling.  But with all of today's technology they are back to drilling and they are all over the place.  We got stopped on the road by a work crew one day - assuming there was construction ahead - but they were unloading what looked like miles of pipeline and heavy equipment onto this property.  It seemed like this whole area revolved around the oil industry, yet we never seemed to see how the people were benefitting.  I still don't know the answer - someone told us that most of them lease out their land for drilling and then get paid as the oil comes in.  There was a reality show on last year about the oil in Ohio - but, in my opinion, they did a horrible job.  It was all contrived and told nothing of the real story there.  What we saw was a bunch of really hard working people, people living away from their families in campgrounds or makeshift campsites all over the place to be close to the work; you could tell that the restaurants and even the bars catered to them with good hearty well priced meals and we could see their camaraderie - groups of them just sitting around a fire at night sharing some "down" time.  I think a story on the people we saw would make for much more interesting tv.

Out on one of the country roads we found what is considered to be the first discovery of oil in the US.  Back in 1814 this couple discovered that there was salt brine in the land, which they started digging for.  All this black stuff kept getting in their way so they soaked it up with towels and threw it away.  It wasn't until long after they were dead that anyone figured out how valuable the land really was.  Oops!

So, as we leave Ohio, I leave with these thoughts. We were only there for 4 weeks and we certainly didn't see it all but we come away feeling that the people of Ohio are very genuine, hard working and very kind.  We never ran into a single person, young or old, that wasn't as nice as they could be.  They have beautiful hilly countryside, a ton of churches (one of them being "The Rushing Wind Bikers Church)  and a lot more history than we expected.   One day while sitting on the back of the bike, we were behind a school bus that was dropping off a little girl.  Her dog was standing at the porch with his tail wagging so hard I swear we could feel it from where we sat.  She ran off the bus, directly to him and gave him a big hug and he followed her into the house, tail still going a mile a minute.  I know we could probably see that anyplace in the country, but for me it will always be a memory of Ohio.  That's the America we are hoping to see.