Family visit

Last weekend I was visited by my ‘American parents’. Since they get motion sickness easily, they needed the front seats of the car, moving me to the back. But being driven finally gave me the opportunity to have some wine with my dinner and I took advantage of that immediately on Friday. We went to a nice place at fountain square, the ‘vibrant’ center of our city. Actually it my first time down town as well, it was about time.
Saturday was the first sunny day in a long time and we spend it in the Cincinnati zoo / botanical garden. Since it is located right next to Cincinnati Children’s, I drive pass it every day and of course had been on my to-do list for a while. I had been wondering where that zoo would be exactly, since I knew where the entrance is, but driving around it I could only see houses. But it turns out to be quite big (distances in the US are still treacherous). The 13 inches (!!!) of rain that we had the past month, did not leave much of the tulips they had, but the rest of the zoo was very nice. And I don’t know what you have been told when you were a kid asking on mother’s or father’s day when it was children’s day, but here they actually got one! And you guessed right, it was last Saturday. That in addition to the small window of opportunity to enjoy sunshine (or even lack of rain), made it a lively day at the zoo. Saturday evening we had dinner on Mount Adams, which provides a great view of down town Cincy and the Ohio River.
Sunday the cloud and rain were back, but we had planned a day indoors anyway. The Wright brothers grew up and developed their first airplanes in Dayton, a town about an hour north from where I live. They also had the first airport there and now they have the national museum of the United States Air Force. We joined a tour of 3 hours by a veteran that flew 19 of the aircrafts in the museum and had a degree in engineering. This guy new a lot and could tell about it vividly, but even that only scratched the surface of what was out there. They had the first aircrafts ever and (almost) everything the Americans have flown or fought afterwards. The museum is 17 acres big, so if you ever happen to be around Dayton OH, you may want to spend a couple of days there (I don’t think there is much else to do in Dayton anyway), I would certainly not mind spending (much) more time there.
In the end I think all of this would have been slightly better if I had not eaten the bad hamburger for lunch at the zoo Saturday afternoon. Without the food poisoning that was the result of that, I probably would not have puked all over the zoo, I would have been able to eat more than half a cup of yoghurt, a few leafs of lettuce and ¾ of a cherry tomato and I would not have stomach cramps from barely having any content in my GI-tract on Sunday. On the other hand, now only the back of my neck got slightly sunburned (probably from facing down that much), had I been facing upward more who knows what sensitive facial skin would have gotten burned in addition with all the wine that I would have had, it would only have made me age prematurely and ungracefully.