Queen of the West

Labor Day is over and I was sure I was going to have polished off most of my major paying assignments by now. I was more than half right, but I’m not quite as far along as I’d like. So I’ll be brief. Or maybe not.

But it was Labor Day weekend, and the thing not to do on Labor Day or its weekend is work. The thing to do is drive to Cincinnati by way of south-central Indiana and then come back. We got a late start on Saturday and so didn’t see much that day, one or another of us had a cold the whole time, and my advice to travelers to Cincinnati, Queen of the West, is to take a good map. My fuzzy memories of an hour’s visit to downtown in 1989 were useless in navigating, and my Rand McNally Road Atlas wasn’t much better—no detailed closeup of downtown or really any part of town.

Also, we ran slap into the biggest riverfront event of the year in metro Cincinnati, both sides of the river, a Labor Day Sunday fireworks show over the Ohio River, which bollixed traffic and parking near our hotel.

Sounds like a lousy trip. But on balance, it wasn’t. There were plenty of bright spots among the aggravations:

We got to visit my brother Jay and nephew Sam, who were in town -- Sam’s now a graduate student in architecture at the University of Cincinnati, and Jay was helping him move in.

We managed to drive two lovely yet lightly traveled roads, one in south-central Indiana south of the town of Nashville, the other hugging the north shore of the Ohio River across from Kentucky.

The fireworks over the Ohio River might have been bad for traffic, but on foot that night we saw explosions framed by the grand old Roebling Bridge.

Had a delicious lunch in a seemingly unlikely place, Aurora, Indiana, and while the 5-way chili at Gold Star Chili in Covington, Kentucky, really wasn’t better than mediocre, it was good to try it, and support regional cuisine.

We chanced on Eden Park, a venerable old Cincinnati park, and took a good walk there. From there we watched a Stealth fighter fly by a few times as part of the festivities along the river.

We visited Cincinnati’s Union Station on Jay’s recommendation, because we could find that and not the William Howard Taft NHS. Completed: 1931. Interior Space: Vaulting. Restored murals on the walls: Intriguing. A fine structure all around.