Ashtabula County, Ohio

The campground where we are staying is in Ashtabula County, Ohio. We picked up information at the Ohio Welcome Center about things to do, and one of the items was a Covered Bridge tour and the other was a Barn Quilt tour. We probably should have gone yesterday when it wasn't raining, but... we went today. It wasn't raining bad, so we were still able to enjoy it.

This was the first bridge we found - it actually took us a long time to get to it... we got on a main road that, unbeknownst to us, was a limited access road, so we couldn't turn off of it onto the route we had planned. Then the road names on the map we were using weren't road names that we could find on the street signs. Then there seems to be a LOT of construction going on in the county at this time of year, and one of the roads that we tried to use a couple of times had warnings about a closure that kept us from getting to the road we wanted. Nonetheless, we persevered and found this bridge... height of 13'5" in the center but just 11'2" on the sides - glad we're in the Jeep and not driving Miss Doozie!

Just after that covered bridge was a barn quilt on the side of a barn - we think that Jimmy and Regina need to put a barn quilt onto the green barn....

Here is a more complete picture of the buildings of the farm - the quilt was hung just on one end of one of the buildings.

 The barn quilts are not just on barns - they may be on barns, covered bridges, or historical buildings. They aren't really quilts either, they are painted on sign board. I read that they might be 4'x4' or 8'x8'. http://www.barnquiltsashtabulacounty.com/

The second covered bridge we found is no longer is use, but had a barn quilt on the side.

You could walk through it, but we decided not to since it was still quite wet.

This covered bridge was not on the normal use road but right beside it. It had a 5T weight restriction...

And it had a barn quilt on the side that faced the normal use road.

This last one that we found was actually quite fancy - I'm not sure that it was a historic bridge, or if it was, it has been modernized.

 One of the things that we had seen on RV Park Reviews about the campground where we are staying was that there was a low bridge on one of the routes to get to it, and so you should use the directions provided by Thousand Trails on their website.

It turned out that there were two options for routes given on the Thousand Trails site - one of them was the same as the route that the Garmin was suggesting when we got to this intersections on Saturday... you might notice that there are detour signs...

The sign says "Road closed 4 miles ahead". The Garmin was telling us we would be turning off route 45 in 4.1 miles, would we be able to make it to our turn? .... we elected to take the other route that the Thousand Trails website had provided.

Unfortunately, there was a road on that route that was closed to "local traffic only" - since we didn't know how far the "local traffic" closure went, we decided to go ahead down that route. It turned out that the road was torn up but passable and we made it through that way.

Today, while we were out, we decided to determine if we could have taken the first route that Thousand Trails and the Garmin were recommending - unfortunately, route 45 was closed just 0.1 mile before we needed to make the turn off of it, so we would have been out of luck if we had gone that way. The way we went, using the "local traffic only" road, was acceptable. We found another route that we think is better than going back on the "local traffic" road and we plan to use it tomorrow when we leave.

We stopped at the campground office on the way back (we managed to lose our parking pass with the gate code on it while we were out... the Jeep ate it...) - I mentioned to the fellow in there our problems with arriving and finding roads under construction. He said that they were working on getting an update to the Thousand Trails website and that no one in the county/road service group had let them know that there were plans to close the roads, so it had taken them by surprise. It would have been really unfortunate if we had ended up going down on route 45 only to find that we couldn't get to the road we needed... and the road before it has a 9' clearance bridge so we would have been out of luck! I guess the road service folks think that tourist season is over and only locals will be inconvenienced - and, as it turned out, we made it through ok.