Ohio - Day 1 - via Youngstown

Streetsboro/Cleveland SE KOA
Wednesday, 1 May 2019

today's route

I don't need to include a map of West Virginia to show all of today's route because I was very nearly in Ohio anyway.  The town of Chester is right on the WV border with both Ohio and PA.

I stopped in Chester before leaving the state because I still hadn't seen its real claim to fame: the world's largest teapot.

The World's Largest Teapot

I got this photo off the internet because the only possible places to park are at businesses across the busy roadway, and I just didn't want to try that with my RV.  I don't remember the flag but otherwise, this is what I saw.

Chester Teapot
In 1938, Hires Root Beer used a huge wooden hogshead barreI - it's about 14' tall and 14' wide - as part of an ad campaign.  Later, that barrel was bought and transported by the owner of a pottery outlet store here in Chester; he coated it with sheets of tin and painted it and poked those holes in it and used it as a hot dog concession stand for years. 

Eventually the store closed and one thing led to another and the teapot was in danger of being demolished.  Local folks made various efforts to save it, but they mostly resulted in the usual sort of squabbling over where to put it that you see in these situations.  Finally, in the '90s, the State donated this land and fence bounded by a highway and an onramp, and a tinsmith donated his expertise and refurbished it.   There's also now a smaller cream pot in the enclosure, but none of the online photos included it, too bad.

Ohio - my 14th state

And Welcome to Ohio!

This little and very old wooden puzzle doesn't quite show how narrow WV's Northern Panhandle is or how it sticks up between Ohio and Pennsylvania, but you can see how much of Ohio's southeastern border is on the Ohio River between WV and OH.  In fact, the Ohio River is Ohio's entire southern border, because it goes on to divide Ohio from Kentucky as well.

But for my travels, coming from the WV panhandle put me already halfway up into OH, so I just kept going north, and then east.  Cleveland sits on Lake Erie (I'm back up in the Great Lakes region again) and Akron is less than an hour due south of it, so I chose a KOA that's right in between the two big cities as my first landing spot here.  Besides, it's the cheapest KOA in the state, some of the others being crazy expensive ($70-$80/night is crazy for a spot in a campground).  So that's where I headed.

Ohio's roads
I stopped first on the west side of Youngstown to do laundry and get groceries and gasoline, which was nearly 20¢/gallon cheaper here than in WV.  But I would have paid much more than that to get road surfaces in Ohio that were as good as those in West Virginia. 

In my opinion, every single person who has ever complained about WV's roads should follow my path in Ohio: come north on State Route 11, get off in Youngstown and go either direction on Mahoning Ave. (I went both ways), then get back on and go up I-76 for 20 miles or so to State Route 14.  Despite having several lanes and shoulders for much of that distance, the road surface was so incredibly rough that I hated - positively hated - the drive.  It was distracting and gave me a headache and slowed my speed way down - I had to go 40 mph in places on the interstate.  The interstate!  I'd rather drive on West Virginia's back roads any day than deal with this sort of thing.

Propane problem
I stopped at a UHaul in Ravenna that advertised online that they sold propane.  By then I was bushed from that drive but nothing's easy when you need it to be.  The UHaul had a small lake of water smack in front of the propane station, about 2" deep.  And the guy told me I had to get everything breathing out of the RV.  That's the way he phrased it.  Well, Lily knows what her carrier box looks like and tried hard to escape, and I got scratched in the process.  I put on my rubber boots and waded out to put her box on dry land and then went back for the dogs, who were thrilled to be outside and thought we were going for a walk. 

Fortunately, I decided to stay and supervise the propane filling, which was good because the guy couldn't get it to take any propane.  He could see as well as I could that the gauge showed only ¼ of a tank left, but nothing was going in.  I told him this had happened several times before and the people before had bled some of the air out of the tank.  So he told me he didn't have the specialized equipment for doing that, and I told him neither did the previous guys, they just opened the relief valve to let out air.  Well, he tried that half-heartedly and then still couldn't get any propane to go in, so he reluctantly referred me to the business across the street which I hadn't noticed - a huge RV dealership and shop.

So I loaded the critters back in and across the street we went, where the guy in charge of repairs was sympathetic but said a) their shop was slammed with folks getting RVs ready to go out for the summer and b) two guys had gone to lunch and they were short-handed.  But I stood there and looked pitiful and asked for advice, and I guess he knew he was going to have trouble getting rid of me so he went to check, and came back saying the guys had come back from lunch and somebody would come to help me.

So the very nice somebody (I've forgotten his name) drove us over to their propane tank (having first to get a forklift to clear a camper out of the way) and - presto! - managed to get my propane tank filled up.  I know there actually is a problem with air in the tank, but I'd been suspecting the main problem today was the UHaul equipment, and it looks like I was right.  But what a hassle.

Thank goodness the KOA was in Streetsboro, only a few straight miles from there.  Only it turned out they'd decided to put us in a campsite that was at the bottom of 2 little rises and I knew rain was forecast for the next few days, so I was a little worried about mud.  But I was too tired to argue much and it was fine today, so there we were.

It was the road condition as much as anything else that made things seem so difficult.  I sure hope that's not an indication of what the whole month is going to be like.