Saturday Excursion

On Saturday, Dianne and I started the day with dim sum at the Grand Oriental restaurant. They have the best in the area we've found -- anyone else have other favorite dim sum spots around Cincinnati? The BBQ pork buns (baked of course) and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf are a couple of my favorites. They also had a nice steamed baby bok choy dish -- although there was a little grit in a couple of them.

After lunch we continued North on a trip to Springfield to visit Competition Accessories. Along the way we stopped in Dayton to drop off tickets for Sunday's fireworks with Dean. The main purpose for our trip to Competition was to get a new motorcycle helmet for Dianne. They have a great selection. Since fit is so important, it's nice to go somewhere to try on several different ones. She settled on a Nolan helmet that has some nice features including a smoked visor you can raise and lower -- pretty handy as you can't be taking your sunglasses on and off while on the bike.

We took a leisurely back-road drive home. Along the way, we stopped in Yellow Springs to look around a bit. The bike trail, formerly the railroad line, goes right through town and the old station building (in photo at right -- click to see a larger image in Flickr) is a rest stop. It's a nice community with vibrant, eclectic selection of stores likely driven by the student community of Antioch. While walking around, we noticed many signs mentioning the preservation of Antioch College. Didn't know what was up until we got back and found that the Antioch University trustees voted to close Antioch College for at least four years, starting next year, for financial reasons. Obviously that will have a huge impact on the community.

In Yellow Springs we listened to a couple of musicians playing the drums and bag pipe. We also saw this rig for hanging chairs off of a square trailer hitch. Never saw anything like that before.

On the way home we again ended up in the Mason/Deerfield Township area and decided to have dinner at the Encore Cafe. It was very good! I had a roasted shallot soup with chives (gotta get my onion fix while out to eat) and a chicken Napoleon (baked chicken layered with roasted red pepper, prosciutto, and provolone) on orzo with seasonal vegetables and drizzled with a bleu cheese sauce. Yum! There were a lot of other entrees on the menu that looked good. The only bad thing is we were too full for dessert -- always good at a Sturkey restaurant.