Zany in Zanesville

(Susan writing)

We decided to stay here for the day because of the miserable weather forecast and Brice’s knee. We hit up a massage therapist, who was pretty helpful (i.e., painful, but in that good way) and saw the town. Apparently Zanesville and nearby Dresden were once the #1 pottery-producing area in the world, so the antique stores are full of ceramic things that are tempting until I think about carrying them on a bike for 2,000 miles. Also, the best-selling Western author Zane Grey is from here (he’s named after his great-grandfather Colonel Zane, after whom the town is named), and John Glenn is from down the road in New Concord, so everything around is named after the two of them.

Tomorrow we’re back on the road. We’re leaving rte. 40 (The National Road, built by Col. Zane) and are continuing on rte. 22 for a while. Our planned stops are: Circleville, Lebanon (the town in Ohio, not the country), Brookville (Indiana!), Columbus (there’s one in Indiana, too), and finally Bloomington, which is our next scheduled rest stop.

Here’s some pictures:

OK, the bridges in Zanesville over the Muskegum river are extremely cool, and not just because one of them is shaped like a “Y,” which apparently it’s famous in some circles for. They are cool because they sing! They are lined with these steel circles, as you can see in the picture below, and when the wind blows just right — as it did today, and vigorously — the circles produce sound just like if you were blowing across the top of a soda bottle. For some reason, they produce different pitches in the same chord series. The 6th St. bridge today was making an E major chord over about an octave and a half range. We took some recordings, but don’t know how to share them on the blog, unfortunately, so you’ll just have to imagine.

There was a sculpture museum in town that had a bunch of sculptures permanently installed on the sidewalk. We had fun with them. The sheep in the pic below was one of a herd, but this one was special, as you can see.