Peninsula Peddler Day

For those of you who may not know me (ok, I guess that means all but one of you!), I am Wendee's husband. She asked me to join the blog, here, to add a few posts now and then, so here I am. Normally, I post to my own blog, which I call Along the Way..., so most of what I post here will probably be copies of what I'm publishing over there, too. :-)

Today was the big day for our small town: Peddler Day!

This is about as busy as I've ever seen Main Street in Peninsula! We actually had to park about a half-mile away from downtown and walk back into town, it was so busy!

(You can click the images to see a larger rendition.)

We had a lot of fun, mostly just walking around and seeing the sights! Even though we live here, now, we really haven't spent much time in Peninsula itself, so a lot of the sights were new to us.

We parked our car near the depot for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, which is an old-timey narrow gauge railroad. Someday, we're definitely going to take the train ride. Maybe when my in-laws come to town in November, we'll ride the "Polar Express" (or whatever they call it now, since the Hollywood movie came out and they had to change their name)!

Then, rather than walking back down the road, we opted to hike the towpath trail that follows the Ohio & Erie Canal (which actually coincides with the Cuyahoga River in this area), where we got to see the ruins of an old lock. The little historical marker nearby says this is the most complete remnant of any of the original locks on the canal!

Just down stream from the lock, was an interesting structure that I figured was part of the whole lock mechanism, until we walked further and discovered that was really the remains of an old dam that was used to power a mill back in the 19th century. Apparently, the mill was completely burned to the ground, in 1931, so there aren't any remains of the buildings, but it was interesting to see the dam, at least.

After crossing the river/canal, the trail wound its way through the woods until we came to a little path that followed some steps up to Main Street, where we emerged to see the bustling village of Peninsula, with all the festive decorations (as you can see in the first image up above).

Here's a photograph of the little, old wooden steps we climbed to get back into town:

Once in town, we spent the most time in a quaint little bookstore, called The Blue Heron, where they have a really cute children's section they call The Heron's Nest. The space was too cramped to get a good picture of it, but I'll try to describe it. They built a huge tree in the center of their young adult section, with a door cut into the trunk. When you open the door, there's a spiral staircase that takes you upstairs to a little room with children's books, a little table for reading/playing on, and some bean bag chairs scattered around. I was really wishing that I could get a shot of the whole arrangement, but since this whole bookstore used to be a little house, it was pretty cramped (and I don't have a good wide-angle lens).

Finally, when we were ready to leave, we walked (the short way, down the road) back to the car and spent another hour taking "the long way" home! We didn't stop anywhere, so I wasn't able to take any more pictures, to show you, but we enjoyed seeing the countryside (while the boys napped). There was one spot, where we got held up behind the CVSR train and I snapped a quick picture through the windshield (which is way too dirty for any pictures taken through it to be very presentable).

I hope you enjoyed the pictures; if you want to see a few more, you can check out my Flickr photostream.