The first ride of the season my wife and I had "kind of" planned ended up being a nice drive with absolutely perfect company. The plan was to saddle up after 2 p.m. as the forecast had called for spotty showers until around 2 p.m. and it was pretty stinking chilly in the morning. So I'm online checking the weather, and I see the radar still showing showers where we are heading. Now, I don't mind a shower or two when it's 80 degrees or hotter but with temps barely climbing above 50, I'll err on the side of staying dry everytime. I told my wife that I didn't really care if we rode the bike or not, I just wanted to get away for a few hours so let's just go in the truck.
We get to Port Clinton to find out our favorite mexican place, Mendoza's is closed, we figured they must have closed for the off season. We head through town thinking, o.k., we really had our hearts set on mexican grub, so now what? We went past the frisch's and both looked at each other and said, we may as well eat there because there really isn't anything else we were in the mood for. We had our rather unremarkable lunch and hit the road.
We first stopped at East Harbor State Park, a stop on a good number of our rides in this area and the spot where I proposed to my awesome wife nearly 6 years ago. We walked along the lake shore just basking in each other and the beautiful although chilly day. We stopped at a couple of other spots in the park and took some pictures. The first picture here is along the lake shore looking towards the Marblehead Peninsula, and the other is from the wet lands across from the lake. There are actually two swans in that photo but the glare and the distance we were from them makes them impossible to see. We left East Harbor to go to Marblehead.
We stopped at a road side park on Catawaba Island, ( it's a peninsula! NOT an island!) and walked along the nature trail there. When the trees and flowers there start blooming it will be a beautiful walk, but this time of year it was just a walk in the woods with not much to see. We left and tried to go to the African Lion Safari Park, the wife loves it, but they had just closed for the day. Undeterred, we pressed on to Marblehead. We arrived to find the grounds very nearly empty. The lighthouse doesn't open up for tours until June, so folks are pretty sparse until then, just the way we like it. We walked the grounds, took some pictures, and my wife played with our new 10X binoculars. Wow, those things are really cool! The picture contains the keeper's house with the lighthouse in the background. This keeper's house is not the house the keeper used for some years. The keeper lived a mile from the lighthouse and rode his horse to work everynight. He did end up moving his family into the keeper's house some years later and remained there until his retirement.
All in all it was a great day away from everything with my wife. The weather did end up cooperating although it still would have been pretty chilly on the bike with the wind coming right off the lake, helping to cool things down even more than farther inland.
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