Hello Ohio!

    So, last week, before I officially started my new job at Guthrie, I decided to take a trip to visit one of my old Disney roommates, Jordan! Jordan lives in Dayton, Ohio, about fifteen minutes from the border of Kentucky. I had never been to Ohio before, so I figured, why not?

You may recognize Jordan from my Disney pics...she worked at Wilderness Lodge!

I flew out on 13th at 5:25 in the morning (ugh), and, after a brief stop in North Carolina, arrived in Dayton around 3:35. Jordan picked me up and she gave me a brief tour of the town before we got to her house. The first night we just hung around her house, which I was perfectly fine with around running around (sometimes literally) a couple airports all day.

The next day we decided to go to the Columbus shopping center (about an hour away) and to a giant indoor trampoline park called SkyZone (identical to Jump Street here in AZ). The shopping center was pretty cool; it had the fanciest AMC theatre entrance I've ever seen in my life

Very art deco

 And I found the best pair of glasses ever...

 

If I could grow a mustache like that I totally would

We hung around there for a while, then headed off to SkyZone, which was pretty fun, but we agreed it probably would have been more fun if we had had a larger group and had been able to play dodgeball. We drove back to Jordan's house and I insisted we ate dinner outside because it was so pretty!

How is that grass real?!?

Seriously, the weather was so nice while I was there; 70s-low 80s all week. Perfect! But later on I got a little chilly, so I had to put on a couple of Jordan's scarves..

Or, y'know, all of them....

The next day, we drove to an amusement park called Kings Island, home to the world's longest wooden rollercoaster (it also used to be home to the world's tallest and fastest wooden rollercoaster, but it was recently torn down).

This is the scariest thing I have ever ridden. You load in it normally, but then it lays you on your back and you ride up the first lift on your back, only to have it flip you over so you're facing the ground for the whole rollercoaster. I thought I was going to die.

Before the terror.

Again, going to a theme park after working for Disney is pretty weird. Obviously, Kings Island is much smaller, so it can't be held to the same kind of standard, but I really noticed a lot of details I know I would have never cared about had I not worked in Florida. At one point, Jordan and I were waiting to board the next train on a rollercoaster, and there was a worker just being generally friendly and chatting everyone up. He asked if Jordan and I went to theme parks a lot, and we just kind of looked at each other and laughed, and had to explain to the dude that we had just worked at one last year. He kinda stopped talking to us after that...


We got there pretty much right as the park opened, so we got done at around one in the afternoon. Jordan didn't particularly feel like going home just yet, so we stopped for some lunch, and then she asked if I wanted to go to Kentucky! Living just fifteen minutes or so from an entirely new state is definitely a weird concept to me, so we decided to go for it.

Proof!

There wasn't much to do in Kentucky...we debated about going to a popular aquarium that was about half an hour away, but we both agreed we had had enough of walking that day.

So we decided to go to Indiana instead.

How could I say no?

We spent even less time in Indiana (really, we just went so we could say I visited three different states in one day); I took the picture and we made a U-turn straight back to Dayton. Pretty fun, though!

On my last day in Ohio we went to see The Great Gatsby and eat some really good frozen yogurt.

 

Afterwards, Jordan, her three sisters, and I went to a graduation party for a couple girls they knew. Jordan had informed me earlier that graduation parties were a pretty big deal in Dayton, but I definitely was not prepared for the sheer amount of people/food this graduation party had. It looked more like a family reunion than a graduation party.

Granted, there were about four girls celebrating together, but even still....the event was held on this farm/park thing (I would just call it a park, but there were like...two story barns you could rent out and there were gazebos and balloon arches....it was nuts), and it seemed like half the crowd was adults, and half the crowd teenagers. Weird stuff.

Anyway, the next day we had to get up super early again so Jordan could get me to the airport, and once again I got incredibly lucky and was able to get on both the flights I needed to get straight back to Arizona. I'm really glad I was able to visit Jordan before my job starts (starts today, actually!); not sure how much traveling I'll be doing now that I'm working/starting a class in July.