9 Aug - Downtown Columbus, Central Ohio Fire Museum, National Veterans Memorial, German Village

 

Today we headed downtown Columbus OH to see a few of the sites.  First stop was the Central Ohio Fire Museum.  All indications on the web site were they were open for business.  We got down there and they we locked up tight.  I took a couple pictures in front of the building and through the windows.  

Would have loved to tour this museum.  

Across the street to the north is Columbus Station #1, so we stopped over there and spoke with one of the firefighters.  He said the museum is staffed with volunteers, typically Columbus FD retirees and he assumed maybe they could not find anyone to work it today.  

From there we headed west to the Arena District where Huntington Park, the Columbus Clippers baseball stadium, is.  We will be headed down there tomorrow night to watch a ball game with Ernie Reid and his family.  I wanted to scope out the parking situation, which we did.  On the way we passed the Columbus Union Station Arch.  Interesting that Columbus used to be known as the City of Arches and this arch is the last remnants of the Union Station originally built in 1850, if I understood it correctly.  It kind of looks out of place here, which it is as it was torn down and put in storage for quite a while during the construction of the Arena District and McFersons Commons Park.  

Then we headed for the National Veteran's Memorial and Museum. We knew it was closed until Wednesday but we thought we would take our chances on what might be visible from the outside.  We struck out there.  Great looking building and nice location but not much to see outside that we could determine.  

OK, starting to get hungry so we made our way into the German Village part of Columbus.  There were several German restaurants there that caught my eye on Google maps.  My friend Ernie suggested Schmidt's Sausage Haus and that sounded good so we drove there.  Well, the streets are old and very narrow.  Many of them become one-way's once a RAM 3500 heads down there.

This street is a little wider than most in the area, but awesome brick streets.

We arrived at Schmidt's Sausage Haus and there must have been 40 people outside waiting to get in, plus parking is non-existent, so we just drove on by, unfortunately.  

We stopped at Walmart on the way back to the campground to restock on groceries a bit.  Later, Ernie stopped by the campground with salads and a BLT pizza from the nearby Pizza Cottage which was awesome!  We continued our reminiscing about our time at Loring Air Force Base, shared a lot of laughs, and had a good discussion about both of our federal civil service time.

Tomorrow we plan to visit the "world's largest basket", the Longaberger Basket Building and then later on tomorrow we will attend the Columbus Clippers baseball game!