April 7-8: Columbus

The journey from South Bend to Columbus was about 5 hours. Not too bad.. and when we arrived, it was at an apartment with friends inside. Always nice to immediately see a familiar friendly face off a long journey.

So, this being night 2 of the adventure, we realized we had yet to "live" in the van. We were met with hospitality and couch/shower offers to start the trip off right. We'd have plenty of van nights in Wal-Mart lots to come, so that was nice.

We made mushroom tacos and sat on their balcony. It happened to be about 70 degrees that day, which was obviously delightful... especially since Chicago's wind chill had been down to 5 degrees the week before. (Really. And I hear it's snowing today, April 13th.)

The next morning, after a shower (which would prove to be our last until... well, let's just say I'm wearing a hat right now..) we wandered around the area, which was not technically Columbus, but Gahanna. A very nice area, although our friend's apartment had this terrifying dilapidated "doll house" next door:

Apparently, no one knows the story behind this place. Let's not speculate.

We wandered across the street to a cafe, where the barista struck up friendly conversation -- further convincing us we were going to be meeting kind strangers and expanding our social shortcomings on this trip, which is wonderful and necessary.

He even told us of a cafe in Seattle where we could mention his name and get free coffee, which we have of course already forgotten the details of.

We drove downtown to the "downtown dog park", which turned out to be a tiny patch of gravel in a fence. We walked to a restaurant "Tasi" (recommended by our barista friend). Great tunes playing, nice atmosphere, decent meal. Then we wandered the arts district, which was pretty cool. The ratio of junkies to non junkies was pretty impressive, and hopefully the adorable little girl who Kevin gave money to through her mom's explanation of a "School drive" won't be using his name (he wrote down his real one! No more, say I) for anything unsavory.

We stopped in to a doggy shop and bought a "thunder shirt" for anxiety for Yoshi just-in-case... we have yet to try it. The gal who worked there had her baby there as well, and told us "if you'd stopped in about 5 minutes earlier you could have seen some excitement.. a drunk just stopped in (it was around noon) and threatened to throw his wine bottle at my head, so I called the cops and they came right away and arrested him. Good thing he didn't, would have hit the baby." I admired her cool-headedness about the whole thing.

After a bit of wandering (and some errand running in Easton Market -- solar shower!) the grey day started to get us down a bit, perhaps a hint of the potential loneliness to come sneaking in. The realization of missing our dearests back in Chi-town. So we hit the road, headed for Cincinnati.