I may have grown up in Colorado, but Ohio was never on my travel radar until last weekend–and that was only because of Hell City. I was only there for four days but it struck me as a weird lovechild of Kansas and South Dakota. If you’ve spent any amount of time in either of those states you’ll know exactly what I mean.
My trip started off a bit rocky…. I guess that’s what I get for wearing a shirt that says “GAY FOR SATAN” to the airport & seating myself directly across from a couple sporting crosses on their neck that bordered on crucifixion-sized. Oops.
En route to Dayton, I spent three hours sitting on the runway before they kicked all of us off the plane. Apparently it’s acceptable to leave a full flight stranded at the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport by deciding to simply cancel the flight without rescheduling. My options were a reduced rate hotel room for $60 I did not want to spend, the terminal floor, or a gorgeous red-blooded Texan male’s bed couch. I felt a little bad telling him the fun was off when at the last minute a seat opened up on a late flight to Columbus, but “sick tatts” had to come first.
It was a long weekend, I can’t lie. I forgot how draining it is to spend 11 hours at a tattoo convention. It’s not like I’m a tattooer, but that’s a lot of face-to-face human contact in a really well air conditioned room. Plus I apparently didn’t get the “black tshirt and jeans” memo about convention attire… so there I was in high-waist shorts I picked up for $3 at a thrift store and a bright yellow grandma cardigan. I was possibly the coolest (read: only) hipster at the entire convention.
On the upside, it seems TattooSnob.com was received quite well by convention-goers. If any of the attendees last weekend weren’t familiar with us on Friday, they were probably so sick of hearing about us over the PA by the end of the weekend that they’ve started checking out the site in their sleep. Which is great, because Kevin & I run the best tattoo blog ever. Seriously, we gave away the trip to Hell City Phoenix including airfare, a room at the resort and weekend passes to the convention. A really nice dude from Philly won, he was pretty excited at the prospect of a free vacation to look forward to at the end of August.
Anyway, once the weekend was over I had a full day to kill before heading home. Are any of you familiar with “Cincinnati chili”? I’m not trying to be an asshole, but the weight problem of Ohio can easily be explained through this photo:
Self-explanatory, right?
Kevin decided what I really needed to do was see touchdown Jesus… so we drove by.
I am completely in awe that things like this exist, though to be fair there were a lot of signs posted in farmers’ fields reminding us of the 10 commandments and that abortion is murder. There’s honestly nothing like Christian middle America!
We even hit the point of having to kill time at a gigantic outlet mall. I found a Michael Kors black leather jacket in my size marked down to $246 with a 40% off sticker on it. I didn’t even bother to do the math until we were back in the parking lot, without owning the best-fitting leather jacket I have ever tried on. I’m still kicking myself over that one.
The airline bullshit was not limited to my incoming flights, either. For whatever reason I was told I would be stuck in Philly due to delays, only to discover my second flight had not actually left yet. I’m sure the other travelers were not amused by me throwing up and having a severe asthma attack at the gate, but running from terminal F to A left me just a bit out of breath.
I probably made one too many Cam’ron references about my trip to Ohio over the last week. Here’s a quote from some HBO show I’ve never actually watched that far better encapsulates my feelings on the area in a way that doesn’t involve drug references:
Even though New Orleans has been destroyed three times and rebuilt, I’d rather own nothing here than all of Ohio.