Moni

OMG You are going "home"! If when you get off of I 71 to go to Kings Island (The Kings Mills Rd / Mason Exit) and you drive past Kings Island drive, you can take a right at the next light and see where I went to High School ha ha (another right at the General Store in front of the High School will take you back out to Kings Island drive LOL).

If you don't take that first right but continue on through the light, you can go through Kings Mills itself. It was just nine streets when my mom moved us there with a population of 800 (in the mid-late 70's). Picture it with open fields and only two gas stations (one at the exit and one at the light) that's what it looked like when I left home.

Staying on that road will take you around the town and down a huge hill where you'll cross the Little Miami River. That hill is the one we used to pack so the buses couldn't make it to school, giving us more snow days LOL.
If you see it, it is scary as hell...extremely steep with an inclined hairpin turn at the bottom.
We lived in the last house in town on the right just before the hill...white with black shutters and the shutters have moons & stars cut-outs in them. I was told last year it hadn't changed a bit. (that's the house my mom threw the radio out the window and into the driveway lol)

At the bottom of the hill and on the other side of the river is an old "Peter's Cartridge Co." building where gunpowder and other handy explosives were manufactured during the Civil War Era. You used to be able to see the smoke stack (painted with an old "Columbia" insignia) from the Eiffel Tower but the forest had grown too tall last time I was there.
It would take you a whole ten or fifteen minutes and there (at the bottom of an even steeper hill), you could always turn around and go back to K.I.

Its an interesting and obscure piece of American History.

If you go, check out the steps that go from one level of the hill to the next (straight ahead from the bridge on your way back) Those were built during the days of the Cartridge Co for employees who walked to work and the woods, on that side of the river to your left of the steps, have small lead-lined buildings along that path where explosives were stored if all the lead hasn't been stolen yet (I know my brother was working on taking it all when I left home) to the right and on the wooded stood a shed with a coke oven behind it...both part of the cartridge co.

At the hairpin turn itself is an obscure path that leads into the woods...that used to be the road from the town I grew up in to Kings Mills, washed out when a flood washed out the bridge and collapsed a dam that was rebuilt farther down river (into Loveland or Fosters).

Then again, taking a left at that light and continuing along that road and across 48, you'll end up in the town I grew up in...don't bother lol...it was dying when I left there and is even deader now from what I have heard. Great place to be if a tornado comes through though! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Have fun in Ohio and Kentucky! [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]