Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Donut trail - Day 2 (on the trail)

 I planned out the donut trail very carefully as I wanted to complete it in one day.  The trail involves 14 donut shops in Butler county Ohio.  Visit all of them and get your "passport" stamped and you earn a t-shirt.  The tricky part is that the shops all have different open/close times and many will also close when they run out of donuts (and they only make a certain amount).  I had charted out a loop that would get me to all of them in a little over 100 miles of driving.  I was out the door at 3:20 am for the first shop and then had an hour to run before the next (close by) shop would be open.

I ran on the Great Miami River trail, but at that time of day saw nothing of the river.  I did see two meteors and a huge rising Venus on the horizon and before the end of the run I also caught the sickle moon rising.  It'd be another 3+ hours before sunrise as I was about as far west as you can go in the time zone.

I had no real issues getting to each of the donut shops until the next to last one when I realized I hadn't programmed one of them into the gps.  That added about 30 minutes onto the trail.  I was done by 9am which may be a record for the fastest completion of the trail.  The woman at "Travel Butler" was impressed with my planning (spreadsheet) and presented me with my t-shirt.  I was surprised to learn that over 3,600 people have completed the trail in the 6 years it has been in existence.




















Next up I did a short drive to Nisbet Park in Loveland OH for a run on the Little Miami River trail.  It was 46 degrees and sunny and the trail seemed well used.  I got in an enjoyable 3 mile run.




Next was a short stop at the Arlington Cemetery to see the final resting place of the inventor of Pringles chips.




Then I was off to Lawrenceburg Indiana for a pleasant run on the levee trail and the Dearborn trail along the Ohio river.  This was a nice end to another busy day.  I crashed pretty early as it'd be another 17 hour day in the car to get back to MA.







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