Ohio Area Nice for Vacation

Ohio Area Nice for Vacation

If planning for a summer vacation, Ohio has really beautiful, balmy summers, and Lake Erie provides lots of recreation. I love my summer vacation home there. I call it the place where the breezes meet. Located near a former religious retreat, it’s clustered on the edge of the lake basin near the southern tip of Lake Erie. To the south side, adjoining the lake is the Sandusky Bay, popular for water sports, and camping. Around this vicinity a town’s population can zoom from 10,000 to a million in one season.

Restrictions on buildings over three stories high reduce availability of hotel accommodations to a certain extent since there is only so much shoreline to go around. For this reason, the accessibility of reservations is best at least six months in advance. It’s a toss up to say exactly why this area is so popular, but activities galore might be part of the reason. In addition to this, ferries shuttle vacationers to three different islands.

In the village of Marblehead, which occupies the extreme tip of what I can best describe as a peninsula, visitors can catch a ferry to Kelley’s Island for dinner and drinks. Marblehead is an interesting area that is experiencing growth while preserving some of its historical quaintness. The Kukay building, which was once an old movie theatre, is newly renovated with deference to the older qualities of the architecture.

Today this building houses a restaurant, a coffee shop with wireless LAN, and The ExLibris bookstore whose proceeds go to establishing a permanent village library. Visitors who take the quieter vacations flock to this bookstore where hardbacks are only two dollars, and paperbacks go for a dollar.

Next-door neighbor to the Kukay building is Wee Willie’s tavern, a great place for beers and football games, where they also serve delicious French fries prepared with no transfats. Not too far away is a gorgeous Russian Orthodox Church that sponsors a yearly Halupka Festival in August. The polka dancing and ethnic buffet make for an unbeatable good time. Around the bend is one of the few remaining lighthouses in the U.S.A.

Two other ferries, located a little farther north in the town of Port Clinton, transport cars and people to an island called Put In Bay, the home of two historical wineries. Lake Erie plays host to such a busy array of activities that visitors often prefer the jet express ferry to be transported back and forth so they can hurry on to the next event. My favorite time of year to visit Put In Bay is the fourth of July, when historic reenactments with real Muzzleloader rifles replicate the War of Independence. Scaling to the top of Perry Monument gives more perspective of the famous battles. A lot of people bring children, but if you do, I recommend steering clear of the main street revelry in this case. Free shuttles can veer around the more adult activities, and people can have picnics in the park where swings and sandboxes are available. The beaches everywhere around Lake Erie are good for taking kids swimming because the water stays shallow near the water's for a long way into the lake.

As the original draw, boating, fishing and camping are still popular activities. Walleye and perch remain the foremost catch. Some people boat the inlets for water skiing. Others easily trailer jets skis for use on Sandusky bay, which is on the south side of the “peninsula.” Water parks and miniature golf courses are dotted around. Across the bay, in Sandusky, is the famous amusement park, Cedar Point.

When the chaos of the tourist season is over, the desolate cold winters have a whole different set of visitors who like to avoid the crowds. Colorful Ohio autumns lead to an oddly serene and beautiful desolation. Without the leaves on the trees, it’s a black and white photograph of frozen shorelines and gray-blue skies. Lending to the restful type of vacation, Reiki Massage is available throughout the year.

Hopefully I haven’t made this sound like a fairytale, although there’s a life-size fiberglass dinosaur right around the corner from my house. As per usual, everything has a down side. Sometimes the traffic is congested since there is only one main road that leads around the finger shaped piece of land between two bodies of water. A little planning minimizes this factor if a trip is plotted to make right turns only. Getting stuck behind slow driving tourists gets annoying, so this is to be expected during peak season. Every now and then there is a chance to pass. I’m very picky about restaurants, and though plentiful, I often find the quality is lacking. A few good places are turning up since this area is experiencing a growth spurt. All the same, accommodating the sudden population explosion is tough for local businesses insofar as finding good employees, who merely get crash courses instead of thorough training. Still, the trade off is worthwhile since there is so much to offer in the way of recreation. Lake Erie is a summer vacation place that has something for everyone.

Eerie on Lake Erie This Year

There's been a strange atmosphere since early spring here on the Marblehead peninsula. Contractors excavating more boat channels for more housing developments unearthed a cemetery of human remains. Believed to be sacred burial grounds, the project was immediately canceled.


Talk of accompanying, strange incidents went without further explanation. Then there were some who began to believe that the spirits there could bless people. Folks could be seen with heads bowed standing along the cordoned off area. After a while, the whole ordeal went hush-hush, and the land was said to have been purchased by a Native American organization.

Although everything was quiet on the burial site, nothing seemed to return to normalcy. Even the garden was slow to produce, with the exception of the corn. Some of the peppers were misshapen, and the tomatoes came up small. Quite a few of them were animated with little distorted outgrowths.

So this is the setting for most of the season until the late part of summer. In late August I'm opening up the used book store where I volunteer every Sunday morning. Forty other volunteers participate in our mission of this place becoming a real library for Marblehead. Housed in a 150 year old, two story building, this place holds a scariness all of its own..

With all of the enthusiastic helpers, the store is usually very tidy. It's really quite noticeable if anything is ever out of place in there. As a result, when I open the door I'm instantly drawn to a book left out on the counter. Set at a casual oblique angle, it felt almost as though it was left there for me.

Its dark cover is immediately haunting. There are translucent, delicate illustrations swirling against a dark blue sky background. Bold capital letters say, OTHER LIVES, OTHER SELVES by Roger J. Woolger, Ph.d.

Then I see a front cover reference to Carl Jung, whose psychoanalytic work has always held my interest. While I turned a few pages into the book, I'm become inundated in a sense of malingering ghostly spirits that seem to have been here all summer. There's also a nor'easter blowing in from the lake.

With the next turn of the page, something else chilling and unexpected grabbed my attention. Other-life sequels, revealed through hypnosis, upturn passages of macabre and horrifically bloody scenarios.

Leaping out in the dim light of the morning, my mental picture of the author's words dwarfed any passing interest of who's who in the psychoanalytic world. The Halloween like imagery detailed past- life hypnotherapy involving of a variety of Dr. Woolger's patients whose former lives ended in violence.

I'm stuck, absolutely pasted into this book, when I should be counting the cash drawer or stocking books, but I can't quit reading. I'm wondering how revisiting scenes of mutilation, and violence from past epochs relate to psychotherapy. I go on.

Soon, as I read through these notes on hypnotic regressions, I find myself imagining the dark ages. After that I go to the days of slavery in ancient Egypt. Then I'm taken to the days of slavery in the U.S. prior to the civil war. All of these are places where patients remembered their past lives taking place. Humanity is so full of barbaric events

The Dark Continent is the location for the following transcription which describes attempts at ferreting out causes of female maladies believed to be carried from a prior life. The author describes his observations of the patient while she is regressed in a hypnotic state:

"A middle- aged woman in one of our workshops had successfully borne three children but had suffered terrible premenstrual cramps. In exploring the pains, she relived a fatal childbirth scenario as an African woman. In the midst of an extremely difficult labor her very clumsy mate attempts to help with the delivery. . .The woman dies in terrible pain. The memory apparently imprinted for future lives in the region of her uterus. . ."

He later tells of seeing bazaar photographs displaying manifestations of violent events remembered. The photos reveal imprints that mysteriously appear in a patient's skin while in hypnotic recall. One man who had been tied up and killed in a previous life showed rope imprints on his arm. A woman remembering a past trauma of being beaten all of a sudden developed welt marks all over her body.

This whole time, I'm finding it curious that I just stumbled onto this book lying out on the counter. I'm under pressure to break away from it. Customers may be showing up any minute.

Although it's the time of year that cornstalks rustle in stormy discontent of their own bareness, and the end of a season where a previously friendly garden thing becomes scary somehow, I think I'm discovering more about the spirits inhabiting the burial site.

With senses alert to what the noreaster may blow onto shore, I've entered a new understanding of why I feel the presence of malingering spirits around here. At least I can see why there is a certain something that drives a shiver of apprehension about unknown, unseen beings.

Maybe that's what we all seemed to be feeling around here on this isolated neck of land embraced by the great mother - Lake Erie. Maybe it's a distant memory of her other lives. . . other places, many of which are dark and frightening.

They are like the recesses of the mind where scary memories dwell, but are triggered to come out from hiding when the corn rustles, and the north wind blows. These are the scary places-the stuff that nightmares are made of - and these are also the reason why this year's autmumn is especially eerie on Lake Erie.

The Heavenly Surround and Our Moon

The moon and two planets are guides in the night sky.

One of the best places for viewing the night skies is somewhere near a large body of water, like Lake Erie.  Long ago, navigating the lake or the ocean required knowledge of the celestial skies. 


Sailor's used the moon to locate other heavenly bodies which indicated the path of travel.  The crescent shaped moons of the first and last phases are regarded as having horns.  The tip of the moon's crescent shape might point to Jupiter or Venus, or Mars and any of the directly visible planets. In turn, these determine the direction of vessels navigating a body of water.  


For land lovers, the moon's position has also had an important function concerning survival. Once astrological properties came into being thanks to the ancient Greeks, the round art was born.  Each pie shaped wedge around the circle had an orderly assignation of astrology signs with each having its own properties.  


Enigmatic as it may be, the life energies represented through the signs carried a special meaning.  Air, Earth, Fire, and Water were known as elements of the varied astrological signs.  This carried an influence for the two or three days the moon occupied any given arc of the circle.  Each pie shaped wedge in the circle is assigned to one of the zodiac signs representing the order they occupy in the sky surrounding the moon and earth.


It goes to folklore that certain tasks of daily life were assigned to each of the astrological signs that rule the overall characteristics of the arcs.  Farmers, especially, used the predictions based on relative positions of the moon and qualities that each exudes. Later, effects on human behavior began entering the celestial picture.   

One of the most important navigation guides is our closest celestial neighbor, the moon.  More than finding the way on a seafaring vessel, we may also view our earthbound lives through the enlightenment of the moon and the properties of each astrological sign.


It's always a wonder how knowledge of the heavens is evidenced in the remains of antiquity.  Important properties were assigned to the position of the moon regarding earth. And somewhere during history the moon became important in every day life. 


Although modern life may appear very different than what our ancestors knew, we still have the daily survival tasks such as food preparation, and gathering.  We have hygiene concerns, repairs, travel, celebrations, and other earthly endeavors.  Astrology is still alive though often regarded as superstition. Yet there are many reasons not to disregard its validity.


For this reason, propagation of the moon sign astrology guide for everyday life has meaning that can't really be disproved.  Even for a skeptic, the pattern of  rhythmic cycles is useful for an arbitrary way to make a monthly day by day plan.  


From experience, this writer learned that certain activities have a better flow in regard to the moon's astrological assignation.  And so much so that it lends a kind of human energy efficiency to everyday chores.  In order to share this experience and the benefits of observing Luna's activities, a weekly moon sign prediction covers most of the bases of going through everyday life.




For a preview of the week in Moon Sign Astrology click the following link:


Carol Gibson's Moon Sign Forecast - Day by Day the Moon Sign Way

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