My wife Nora and I were married in 1981 AD (After Disco). We gave each other bicycles as wedding gifts, and rode from Cleveland to Millersburg that summer. This was a time before the internet and Google Maps; a map back then was a large, folded piece of paper that you got at a gas station, and one inch on the map represented 11 miles on the ground. We only rode the main roads, as there was no clue on the map about where the county roads were, or where they were headed.
I thought of this when riding the Holmes County Trail into Millersburg. On the left in the photo below are the guardrails that follow OH 83. On the right is the Holmes Country Trail.
OH 83 is a main road in northeast Ohio that heads north to Wooster, Lodi, up into Lorain County, and ends at Lake Erie. As a state road, some effort was made to level the route, but it is still hilly, heavily-travelled, noisy, and hot on a sunny day in July. OH 83 is not marked as “bicycle friendly” on Google Maps. I have no notes from our 1981 bike trip to Millersburg, but Nora and I undoubtedly spent some time riding on OH 83.
Below is a Google Maps photo of the same spot as seen from OH 83. There is constant traffic on OH 83, and not much room on the edge for bicyclists. In contrast, the Holmes County Trail, seen behind the brush on the right side of the photo, is virtually flat, has no motorized vehicles, and is largely shaded. The trail offers a far more enjoyable ride today than OH 83 did in 1981.
When I think back on my OTET trip, my first thought is gratitude. I probably rode on as many as two dozen individual, unrelated trails on the OTET, each of which has a unique development history and is maintained by people living nearby. I am grateful for all the time and effort that others put into these trails, but am especially grateful to the Ohio to Erie Trail organization that stitched these individual trails into a truly enjoyable bike route between Cleveland and Cincinnati https://www.ohiotoerietrail.org/
Thank you all!