Go Metro

We had to chase the bus around Tri-County Mall to find the bus stop. Fortunately, there was a very polite driver who rolled down his window during his rest stop between runs at this end point and advised us where to drive to (at the other end of the mall parking lot) to park our car and get on at the official start of the downtown route.

Yesterday morning arrived with sun and warmer weather than we had had during most of the week, and we had heard that there was a book festival in downtown Cincinnati--Books by the Banks, though it was held in the Duke Energy Convention Center rather than at The Banks, the trendy new area fronting the Ohio River where I would have expected it to be by virtue of its name. We had been thinking of trying out the Cincinnati Metro public transportation from our northern suburb to the city, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

The first thing we noticed after we got on the bus and it started its route was that there were two other stops for this and two other lines closer to our house than the one we had found at the mall--one within walking distance. We were familiar with the route for the first half of the tour--this was all area that we drive through for shopping and general days out. We had also driven down the lower part of Winton Road just a week ago to go to an evening dinner and auction in Clifton. Then we passed Findlay Market and the area leading up to Music Hall, and then, suddenly we were in what I would term "downtown." The driver had promised to tell us when we should get off so that we would have only a couple blocks to walk to the convention center. We noted the "end point" of the route at Government Square, but we didn't get off there--we continued on the "return" journey, which seemed to criss-cross over many of the downtown streets, partially to facilitate downtown transit, but also due to the inconvenience of road construction for a new trolley.

The book festival was a noisy to-do. We visited several of the tables staffed by representatives from the various libraries and arts organizations throughout the Greater Cincinnati region. I replenished my pen and pencil, post-it note, and bookmark collections and picked up a lot of information about the organizations that contribute to cultural life in the area. We also wandered though the new book displays and chatted with some of the authors, but we did not manage to hear any of the scheduled talks and panel discussions. W left the convention center and went looking for a place for lunch. We soon found ourselves headed toward Fountain Square but ran into a detour at the 5th Street Gallery and discussed art with this month's guest artist Tom Pope, an interesting photographer.

After a light lunch at Potbelly's, we decided to head back to the bus stop but first happened upon an office of Cincinnati's tourist bureau, where we picked up some good maps and brochures and chatted with a woman who remembered a couple places that we knew from our limited time in Cincinnati eons ago: Avco Electronics, where Johannes worked, and Wiggins Restaurant, where we went on our first date. Both exist only in memory now.

We discovered that Government Square, that end point terminal of the bus line that we had passed through on our trip down, was just behind Fountain Square, and we only had to wait seven minutes before the next bus came. The trip back seemed longer than the one-hour trip down, for we were tired now, but we still watched carefully and observed the route, thinking that there may be times when we want to take in an event downtown and leave the driving to someone else.