Road Trip: Ohio
Day 7: Thursday, April 11, 2019 - Toledo, OH
Day's statistics:
Weather: 46*, windy
Steps: Steve 9,295; Linda 8,578
Drove: 145 miles
*Before I get into the details, you may have noticed the asterisk on the weather. The high during the day was about 46°. We left Toledo after stopping at the National Museum of the Great Lakes, which closed at 5:00 (perhaps it was 5:05 or 5:10). It was cold and windy, and we headed toward Wadsworth, which was only about two hours away. Within the hour it was in the upper 50s. By the time we got to Wadsworth, it was in the upper 60s. Very weird. (Glad we weren't in Minniapolis, because they were in the low 30s and had up to a foot of snow.)
Today was a lighter breakfast. No eggs or protein, just waffles, breads, cereal, yogurt. So it was going to be a three meal day. Or so we thought...
Our first major destination for the day was the Toledo Museum of Art. This museum is over 100 years old. It was bigger than we thought it would be. Much. But they did have some very interesting works by some very famous artists.
Monet's Antibes Seen from La Salis.
Cézanne's The Glade and Avenue at Chantilly.
van Gogh's House at Auvers and Wheat Fields With Reaper.
Renoir's The Green Jardiniére.
Degas' Victoria Dubourg.
Rodin's The Thinker. It sort of loses some of its detail in the image...
Some jewelry pieces.
A nice nylon rope piece.
Seriously, you don't think a museum would have nylon rope, do you? Let's take a closer look, shall we?
It's a beaded piece, in case you couldn't tell. Anyway, moving on...
A fancy bowl
And some other interesting works (for one reason or another).
An old bank teller's wicket.
A vase, with some very detailed dots on it (I couldn't imaging painting all those dots...).
A piece called City Skyline (or something similar).
Just... sort of interesting.
The first picture is of the image from a distance. The second is a close up - looks sort of like one of those mosaic images.
A cast crystal and aluminum piece called Demeter.
Into the Egyptian room, a section of a column header.
A mosaic, with a close-up of the center.
These glass balls were actually on display outside the gift shop.
Fitzgerald's Fairies Favourites. There are more than two dozen fantastically attired denizens in the image.
Scott's Nuanced Veil.
Kaphar's Watching Tides Rise. I thought this one was peculiar.
A vase.
Frosch's The Risen Christ.
We were in a room that held a huge number - probably at least a thousand - of what are called "Netsuke", meaning
"Root Fastener". While that doesn't mean much, they are little items that are fastened to the end of a
cord attached to a sack, that would hang over a robe sash.
They are all tiny, about two inches or smaller in size. These pictures make them look a LOT bigger. Remember
when looking at the detail, how small the really are.
We finished - after nearly three hours - and headed across the street to the Libby Foundation's Glass Pavillion, and passed this
sculpture outside the museum.
Just inside the entrance door to the Glass Pavillion was this large chandelier like object:
We had a cup of coffee in the coffee bar and then started looking around. There were a LOT of items to see. Some
were new, some old, some plain, some interesting. Here are the ones we thought were particularly interesting.
These large glass ball floats were at least two feet in diameter. They are the largest most technically difficult
sculptural forms created by Dale Chihuly.
Some glassware from the second half of the first century.
A mosaic glass striped bowl from the late first century.
A collection of items from mid-fourth to early thrid BC glassware.
We transitioned from the very old items to a collection of items of various ages.
A deli in glass. GLASS! The tiny glass bottles on the shelf, food, counter, stools, most - if not all - in GLASS!
This was from 1986. Notice the fine petrusions at the three corners.
A paperweight with some nice details inside it.
A glass jewelry box
Some glassware from from Japan, nineteenth century.
A big collection of paper weights, with a lot of detail in each - Islamic glass from Persia and India.
The Grotto of the Chocolate Nymph in flameworked glass, American pressed glass, wood, mixed media.
This flower doesn't appear to be solid glass, but rather a collection of thin glass rods.
Pair of Victorian Cameo Glass Vases with Girls Dancing. No kidding, right?
Handkerchief Vase.
A pair of matching vases. In the second image, the intent was to show the color with the light from behind.
Camel on Parade from the mid 1700s.
A sugar water set from the mid 1800s, with nice detail in the stoppers.
If a doctor ever tells you to only have one glass of wine per day, be sure it is one as big as this blown glass one from 1661.
We sat in on the glass blowing demo for a little bit, but since it was already 2:30 - we needed to get to lunch. We were
there for a little more than an hour anyway. Remember I said at the top of the page that this was going to be a three meal
day? Well, not so much. We were at the restaurant a little before 3:00. We had stopped at the
Sidon Lebonese Grill. Linda ordered the Chicken Shawarma with
a side salad, while I had the Lebonese Chicken Fajita sandwich, with a side of fries (I was considering the salad
too, but since there were onions and peppers on the sandwich, I didn't think it was necessary...).
Had Blue Sky Drive-in in Wadsworth had a movie playing on Thursday night, we would have made our way there (instead of hanging out in Toledo longer). But they didn't, so we didn't.
We were back on the road by about 3:30 and the National Museum of the Great Lakes was our last destination of the day in Toledo.
We arrived and looked around for a little over an hour. There weren't too many artifacts to see, it was more interactive, hands-on,
and videos, with a lot of reading, but still very interesting. Here are a couple of the items that we thought were photo-worthy.
Some old lighthouse lenses.
A Morse code simulator.
A Palorus - a navigation tool.
Outside the museum was this large propellor.
Unfortuantely, and sadly, the ship wasn't open yet for tours - it opens in May. Here is a stitched image of it.
This was the bridge over the Maumee River, that we crossed to get to the Great Lakes Museum.
And the city of Teledo skyline (the ship is just to the right, off screen).
We didn't get to go to the Manor House, but that was an "optional" thing anyway. And thus ended our tour of Toledo. Rather than hop on the interestate, we decided to take Route 20, which ran parallel to the interstate, since we weren't in such a hurry anyway. We got to the hotel by about 7:30, and had some wine. Turns out that even if the drive-in was showing a movie, we still would have been early for it.
We planned the next three days (we wanted to plan the meals [my Mensa event included most meals], the trip to the National Park Friday Morning, potential church service Saturday night), watched some TV, took a quick stroll, and went to sleep.