McConnelsville, OH

We were definitely the only ones at Kooser State Park that night. Ben said there had been other reservations shown on their website, but I guess they chose not to come.

I let Cody wander on our morning walk – he loves the snow.

It looked like a pretty park. There was a trail nearby, but we didn’t take the opportunity to check it out. After the day we had yesterday, we didn’t want to get started too late.

From Kooser State Park, we headed to Old Bridge Brewery in McConnelsville, OH. We passed Jesse Owens State Park on the way. It is a very large park – thousands of acres. He grew up in Cleveland and went to Ohio State.

McConnelsville is a small river town along the Muskingum River. Google calls it a village. Sure, I guess. The brewery is right in the middle of town (“village”), and I was nervous about us navigating into the parking lot. Luckily, the place was pretty quiet when we arrived around 3. The host moved one car for us, so we could park in the designated spot. I think they prefer we take up only 2 parking spots, but we ended up taking 4 for our steps and slide out. Well, technically 5 when you count the truck parked. They didn’t seem to mind, and the parking lot never got really busy. The brewery is in the background in the photo below.

We tried the beer after dinner. They leaned toward lighter beers, and their selection didn’t have much flavor. Not terrible beer, but nothing we really enjoyed or would want to go back for. We had an early night, read a bit and turned in. The battery got us to about 4:30am before it ran out of juice. This is an estimate based on what I imagine is when the furnace stops working. I woke up around 5:30 too cold to sleep. We started the generator to run the furnace and charge the battery. Part of our trial and error – we’re finding that we need to run the generator at least an hour in the evening so the battery will get us through the night. We’ll try that at our next harvest host stop.

I took Cody on a walk to check out the area. There’s a nice little neighborhood just east of us. I was hoping to get some sunrise photos at the bridge, but the morning was overcast. We checked it out a little later. The Old Bridge isn’t used much – they have a newer one up the river which had more traffic. It was a nice walk though.

We packed up and headed on to Wright-Patterson. We were ready to get to shore power and the base amenities!