Purnography on the lake – trip to Ashtabula county, put-in-bay

A bunch of us went to Ashtabula county and Put-in-bay island over the weekend; beautiful lake Erie beach locations on the northern side of Ohio.

We started off from Columbus on Saturday early morning, the weather wasn’t perfect as it started raining. After nearly slipping out of the ramp, I managed to get the car on to highway and we drove for nearly an hour before halting at Bellville for some breakfast. The weather got better by then, but there was some drizzle. The tulips near McDonald’s looked beautiful too.

We couldn’t help but notice that fuel prices have almost reached sky, well thankfully we weren’t stopping for a refill.

We reached Geneva on the lake by noon. A beach side village with population of 6500. Since we reached there 2-3 weeks earlier than the holiday season, the village looked even more empty with hardly anyone on the roads. We checked in to our cottage and quickly left to see the scenic Geneva state park on the lake Erie shore. The beach was bright and windy, and the waters were cold.

We left the state park after a couple of hours to eat something. We started off to visit one of the vineyards in Ashtabula county. We stopped at this beautiful looking wine tasting room and spent sometime enjoying the bright sun light and country side.

We set out to visit the famous covered bridges of Ashtabula county later. There are about 16 of these historical bridges. We could manage to see 3 of them as we kept loosing our way across the county constantly bumping into the same vineyard.

We took a pit stop near the Mechanicsville road bridge at Grand River Manor bar which apparently is famous for good food, cold beer and lousy service.

As we were leaving I captured these,

Later at night we played dumb-charades while gulping the wine we got from the winery. We crashed late into night and had a quick sleep before hitting the road next day, in search of something else to do.

After roaming to few places (mainly Cedar Point, which was closed for winter) we reached to Putin bay island. This is a 1-2 mile sized island on the lake Erie famous for its churches, laid back living style. We rented a golf cart there and roamed around the island. This gave the unique opportunity to experiment some of the finer aspects of my driving – namely accelerating while braking on turn and driving without seat belts.

We stopped at Perry peace memorial at 3 pm.

The island looked picturesque with everything looking green.

We left the island around 6 to catch the last ferry back to mainland,

Thanks to Google maps, on our way back we took a really scenic route for almost 40 miles on state roads[via OH13, CR77, OH 545, OH 603]. The road was really beautiful with bridges, tall trees and greenery on both sides. Before we could realize were back in Columbus and it was still raining when we returned home.