Ohio - Day 22 - vet in Cincinnati

Rocky Fork State Park
Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Gracie sometimes retreats to the front seats when she's nervous about being out in the cabin.  As you can see, she's too big to fit very well.  She was actually dozing when I took this photo.  Dexter's a little smaller and a lot more agile, so he can curl up fully on the seats, no problem.

today's route

It was time for Gracie's booster for the Lyme disease vaccine, and I chose the nearest Banfield that I thought I could get to easily that also had a good Yelp rating.  Which was this one, northwest of Cincinnati.

I didn't want to go all that way (predicted to be a 1½-2 hour drive each way) without doing something else in Cincinnati in the same trip, and I actually planned a driving route to the Pres. Taft Museum and figured I could cram it in before our noon vet appointment.  Then I realized how tired I already was, let alone how exhausted I'd be after driving so much, and I gave myself a break.  So today was just about the vet and the drive.

The campground is about 4 miles outside of Hillsboro, and on the way into town I saw a sign saying this was the birthplace of Eliza Jane Thompson, who was involved in the Temperance movement.  I looked her up and learned she was more than that: she was involved in the beginning of the movement and, through her efforts, managed to close down the 20 saloons that had been operating in Hillsboro.  Impressive woman, given the lack of power women had in the 1870s, which is when she was doing all this.

I also looked up the word "temperance" in the hard-backed Webster's I brought with me and found 2 definitions - one of moderation, and the other of abstinence from alcohol.  Which is what I thought: a social movement took a perfectly good word/concept (moderation) and hijacked it to mean the opposite (abstinence).  There are several in today's life that have done the same thing (a peeve of mine).

It's clear from driving through town that there was once a lot of money in this town.  There are a number of big fancy houses on the edge of downtown and a couple of old fancy buildings around Main St.  Although I looked hard, I couldn't find anyone online - including the City of Hillsboro - that wanted to tell me when the town was founded or what industries drove its early success.  I passed an old building called Highland House that appeared to be a local museum, but they seem to be open only very limited hours.  Oh well.

Out in the countryside I passed a farm that had several donkeys in a field and a llama in a separate field.  Guess they don't get along.

I passed some fields that had been plowed and others that were still covered with weeds.

I saw what appeared to be a river otter cross the road up ahead of me, but it didn't make sense to me that it'd be an otter.  As far as I could tell, we weren't all that close to any body of water, which is where they usually live.  I've looked up other Ohio mammals that are in the same size range, but none of them looks quite the same as what I saw.  Who knows.  A medium-sized mammal crossed the road.

I passed a bunch of signs advertising a Bluegrass Bash coming up.  I looked it up and learned that it's sponsored by a nonprofit radio station that uses this annual event as a fundraiser for the station.  Sounds a lot better to me than the semi-annual pledge drives on public radio.  (Which reminds me of one of the high spots in the Melanie Griffith remake of "Born Yesterday" which is early in the movie when she's talking to Nora Dunn's snooty character who's inviting her to be on her NPR program, and Nora Dunn says, "You know NPR, yes?"  to which Melanie Griffith replies, "They're the gun people, right?" and Nora Dunn says, "Well, during fundraising we are but otherwise we're just National Public Radio.")

I passed a sheepdog in a field with a few cows, including a young calf that the sheepdog seemed to be trying to play with and the calf was trying to ignore it.  I wished I could find a place to stop and watch.

I can say with some confidence that the John Deere dealership in the area is very active.  I've seen at least one John Deere product at every farm and home I've passed.

We got to the vet's office a full hour earlier than our appointment, so I went in to ask anyway if they could take us early.  Which they could, great news, so I hustled both the dogs inside (Dexter barks constantly and scratches frantically at the window if I try to take Gracie anywhere without him, so they go together everywhere).  Gracie got her shot and, since Dexter was there, his paw got checked out - the vet said the claw seemed to be healing well.

I treated us all to a Burger King Whopper Jr. (split a separate patty between the critters) and everybody got a short walk and we drove back again.  Pleasant uneventful drive.