After two days at Cedar Point, the rest of the trip to Ohio couldn't possibly be as exciting, right? Well, yes, right, but since we'd driven so far to get there I wasn't about to turn around and drive home so soon, so Wednesday morning we checked out of the Breakers and drove back to Columbus, arriving at Scott's place around 1pm or so. We had a few things in mind to visit, based on a book on touring Ohio with kids that Beth had found at Ocean State, but nothing that was too time-consuming. Scott gave us the tour of Columbus (that is, he gave me the tour of Columbus, the kids were busy in the backseat and Beth was reading a book), and our first stop was the Deaf School Topiary Gardens, which no one had heard of but turned out to be a block from where Shelley works. Someone had taken it upon themselves to create a topiary tableau of Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Grand whatever", said to be the only painting that's been recreated in topiary, a dubious claim at best. We also stopped downtown at Columbus's own recreation of the Santa Maria, the original of which never made it near Columbus, but that's okay. Shelley said the locals view it as kind of a joke. We didn't take the tour, but there was hardly anyone else around, and there were empty bottles floating in the water.



While I was trying to parallel park so we could see the thing close up, Justin decided to present me with his Father's Day present. Not sure why he picked that precise moment, but there was no arguing with him. Afterwards we met up with Shelley back at the house and went out to eat at a local barbecue place that was reminiscent of Tennessee's here, but with better napkins. On the way back we stopped at a big ice cream store/factory/mecca down the road that Scott will be sad to leave behind. The kids could go to sleep in separate rooms at the house, which always works better than in a hotel, although they were still up kind of late.



Thursday Scott navigated us over to the Anthony-Thomas candy store and factory out in some office park on the edge of town. Unlike just about every other factory left in existence, this one still gives you real tours (free, even) of the real factory, with a free chocolate/peanut butter buckeye at the end (I got two since Chloe won't eat peanut butter). The kids thought that was all pretty neat, as did the grown-ups. For lunch we went to the Ohio State Hall of Fame Cafe, where you can dine surrounded by artifacts and holy relics from Archie Goodwin and various other former Buckeyes. I reminded Scott that he won't have one of those in Bloomington.



In the afternoon we headed on over to COSI, the science museum which, although in a brand new state of the art building, has apparently has fallen upon hard times and is closed two days a week for the summer. There was a good travelling exhibit there of dinosaurs from China which Justin liked a lot, as well as the Gadgets area with lots of little hands-on science experiments, and both kids went for the I/O section with all the computer stuff. We got into another section with the vague name of "Adventure" which turned out to be this elaborate maze that was supposed to be like an Indiana Jones-style archaeology puzzle, looking for clues in dimly lit caves with doors that opened and closed as you walked through them. Chloe got too freaked out after a while, so I took her out of there and while everyone else finished the maze we checked out the Ocean section, which had several hands-on water experiments in one section, and a recreation of a submarine in another. The museum closed at 5, but there was a 5pm showing of the 3D Imax movie "Bugs", which Justin had wanted to see at home, so we checked that out. The 3D effect was kind of neat in this context, we kept reaching out to touch stuff that was right in front of us. Chloe didn't like some of the bugs being quite so large, but she made it through okay.



From the museum we went straight to dinner, meeting up with Shelley again in the German village at Schmidts, a big German restaurant known for their sausages (Scott had recently delivered an order of 20 lbs worth to Uncle Kenny, who needed to stock up once he found out Scott was leaving Columbus soon). They had a buffet that was a good way to sample different things, and had enormous cream puffs for dessert (although I opted for the banana cream pie). We got back to the house at a decent hour, so we put the kids to bed earlier than they'd been all week, and had enough time to watch Pirates of the Carribean on Scott's new DVD player (although I passed out shortly before the end).