In the last thirty hours or so, we have made zero forward progress on our trip home.  We’re taking a breather, a last stretch before the last stretch, if you get my drift.  A gulp of air in preparation for the final sprint to Rainbow Lake, if you take my meaning.

We’re staying at our friends house near Cincinnati, Ohio.  Specifically, we’re in Camp Dennison in Hamilton County.  Our friends are Darcy and Judy Havill.  Now you may recall the Havills from earlier postings, before the Travel Series began.  They are neighbors of ours at Rainbow Lake.  Their real home is here.  Their house in the Adirondacks is where they spend most of the summer.  Darcy is the guy who put our stone walkway together and earned himself the satisfaction of creating a beautiful stone path as well as a place in the rarefied world of my blogosphere.  I teased him and Judy, his wife, about living here in a fly over state.  Now I realize that I was partly incorrect.  We’re here, so it’s not a true fly over state for us, right now.  But, as I look at the jetliners flying over, I realize that Ohio is sort of a fly over state.

Life can sometimes be so complicated.

Well, they let us park the R-Pod across from their main house.  They also own a beautiful little house that is being renovated (by Darcy…the guy can do anything)…there’s even an early 19th century log cabin in their backyard!  We got a tour of the various buildings on their property.  Everything is very old and antiques rule the various nooks and crannies.  His projects are without number and he has many places to hide in and putter.  Everyman’s dream.

We get to the house next to the R-Pod.  It’s old and it’s yellow…very yellow.  And, it’s haunted.  Darcy says that when he’s working at night in some parts of the house, he can feel a “presence”.  Hearing this, I pull my iPhone out of my fleece jacket pocket and find the App that detects ghosts, or “entities”.  I turn it on and watch the little hand sweep in circles like a sonar detector you see in the John Wayne movies about submarines.  Every blip on the App screen is an entity, a green dot shows up.  Within two minutes, a green dot shows up.  It’s right behind me.  Then a pale red dot appears behind Darcy.  That color indicates an especially “active” center of EMF “energy”, or a ghost.

The App is free and is tagged as “entertainment”, but I know better.

The device is even tuned in to pick up audio (voice) messages of words said by long dead people.  According to the App description, these words, once spoken, stay around in the ether indefinitely.  When I first started using the App, the words I heard most often was “gullible”.  It’s all so very paranormal.

We then took a drive around the area and saw a nature preserve and gated communities.  We parked in a small village and looked into some shops.  In one antique store, I was forced by my wife into buying even more old books.  I keep insisting that we have enough books at home but Mariam said she’ll always be able find room for more.

[And if you believe the above statement, I’d like you to take a look at some swamp land in Tennessee we’d be willing to sell you]

Then, in the afternoon, it came time for me to further the democratic process and lend my hand in a local election.  Our hostess, Judy, supported a certain candidate for the county fiscal office.  Judy needed to make some phone calls to encourage people to get out to vote and to vote for this particular person.  How did I help?  I went to our guest room and stayed real quiet, allowing Judy to concentrate on these calls.  I didn’t pester her about things like scones, coffee or local ice cream.  I stayed quiet and out-of-the-way to let her “get out the vote”.  I think I was so quiet that I took a nap.

That evening, the four of us joined the candidate and several dozen friends at a local BBQ place for, hopefully, a victory party.  We kept our eyes glued to the zipper of election data at the bottom of the TV screens, below an episode of C.I.S.

About 10:30 pm, our friend was declared the winner!  We cheered.  Hugs all around.

I stood aside, quietly watching the joy in the room.

Quietly congratulating myself on the role I had played in this little corner of democracy in this most amazing land of ours.

Our trip was nearly complete.  After all, what more can a “hard traveling” guy like me do?

I wanted to leave behind a silver bullet or something and have people whisper: “Who was that stranger who helped our cause?”.  But, I’m too humble to take credit for saving democracy in Ohio.  Besides, I had a comphy bed to go home to.

I had to start this blog.

This is the yellow house.  The now famous R-Pod is just visible to the right, just over the hedge.  I think I see Uncle Sam in the window, waving at me.