Darke County Ohio

I was lucky enough to get a pic of the cutest 1 year old kid in the world playing with a friendly farm cat at the family homestead near Brock Ohio. This is Nathaniel D. and Momcat enjoying each other's company (Nathan is on the left). Our family farm has been the scene of kid-animal interactions like this for over 100 years. My grandmother did it, my dad did it, my sibs and I did it, my kids and all my sib's kids have done it and even the grand kids of my sibs have experienced this joy.

That is 5 generations of humans and probably over 20 generations of cats and dogs all within 20 feet of where Nathaniel and Momcat met yesterday. I will bet a lot of area farms can say the same thing . It is part of rural living.

This is the fountain looking south down main street towards courthouse in Greenville Ohio. This fountain is in the middle of a large traffic circle which has been a challenge to over come for any student driver within 30 miles for many many years --probably 4 generations worth.

This is the internationally famous landmark gum wall at Maidrite in Greenville. No one(or at least anyone I have talked to) knows exactly how this all started but Maidrite has been in Gville since the 1920's, so some of that gum is probably historical in itself. There have been stories floating for years about certain area youths visiting Maidrite and selecting fairly fresh gum from the wall and recycleing it(chewing it). Personally I can neither confirm or deny any of those stories.

Although this Maidrite is the only one anybody has heard of around here when Miss Sassy and I were in Iowa we came across a whole chain of these restaurants that feature serving loose ground beef on buns. We learned that the earliest Iowa Maidrites date back to the 1920's as well, but none out there have ever heard of a gum wall and we had to dig up pics from the internet for them to see.

This is my favorite place to eat in Greenville, which specializes in wonderful salad, soup selections and sandwiches.It is like having a New York deli in town. and the owner Aaron is a local guy and as good a stick as you will find anywhere.

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I will be sticking around the area for about a week before heading to Washington DC,probably next Sunday or whenever I recover sufficiently from son Russ's bachelor party on Saturday.
Although I thought I was going to take a break from picture taking and blogging until I got back on the road agaain I keep seeing local stuff that I would photograph and write about if I saw it while traveling somehwere out of the area. So I will be blogging for the next week using Darke County stuff as focal point. I am already planning some local bike rides to see some things that I have seen a million times before but never as an interesting blog topic.
This should be cool.