Day 19 – July 7, 2019

The Econo Lodge offered free breakfast. We didn’t expect much, but it was actually quite good. Cereal, bagels, fruit, juice, toast, yogurt…and pancakes!

A lot of hotels make waffles available with a waffle iron, but never had we seen this. It was a pancake machine.

Press a button and in moments out slide two warm, fluffy, delicious pancakes. It will no doubt go down as the most impressive technology we will see during Big Trip 4. And to think that we saw it at the Decatur, Illinois Econo Lodge.

Unfortunately, this was to be the height of our excitement this day, as we designated this a driving day.

Within a few hours we made it into the Eastern Time Zone (which means we lost another hour) and then Indianapolis. We stretched our legs, did some shopping, had lunch and kept on driving.

We pulled into Cincinnati around 7:00 and snagged a campground. The tent went up quickly. Our neighbors commented that had never seen people from California set up a tent so fast. Then it was back in the van. Our next destination: King’s Island themepark.

This is a ritual for us. We like to pop into a themepark late in the day. That way we get to figure out where everything is. We usually end up hitting a couple rides and closing down the park.

We got to King’s Island around 8 and it closed at 10. How we would have liked that hour back. Stupid time zones.

Ashley rode a couple of roller coasters, one wooden and one steel. She loved them.

My focus was on riding an iconic coaster called the Beast. I had heard that riding it at night was the ultimate experience. This far north, dark doesn’t happen before 9:30.

We entered the queue right at 9:25. Then we heard the announcement that the coaster would suspend operations at 9:45 for the nightly fireworks display. We decided to hang in there because we thought we could make it. Sadly, we were one train short. We were confronted with a decision. Either wait for the fireworks to end or get out of line and get our free meals.

Kathy was hungry. We left in search of a place to eat.

With only a few minutes left before park closing, we were finding a lot of restaurants had already closed.

Dispirited but not giving up, Kathy found a place that was open. As the throngs of people were heading for the gates, Kathy raced through the masses and managed to make it through the doors moments before they were closed.

The place was Skyline Chili. They have a chain of restaurants in the Cincinnati area. We ordered two chili dogs and a plate of spaghetti with chili. Both were piled so high with cheese that it looked like we had two mounds of cheese for diner. It was okay, but we won’t be having it again when we visit for a full day tomorrow.

We got back to the campground, went straight to the tent, and we quickly fell asleep.