Around Ohio

Circling the Buckeye State

Ohio isn't exactly round, but more of a square with nibbles taken out of it by neighboring Kentucky and West Virginia.

But the name feels round and looks round, and the state tree, the buckeye, sports a round nut. While the nut isn't edible, the buckeye candy is, a globe of peanut butter goodness dipped in chocolate.

Tall spiky yellow blossoms on a tree — An Ohio buckeye in bloom

The Buckeye Trail, a whopping 1,444 miles in a single state, is one of the longest loop trails we know of. So there's a lot of roundness circling around Ohio.

And that's what we did: circle the state. John is a native Floridian. But his Ohio lineage goes back on both sides of the family to the earliest German immigrants who came to Ohio to farm, including the founders of the town of Lithopolis.

Sandra has a passing familiarity with Ohio, having lived in the Ohio Valley in Pennsylvania for more than a dozen years, with forays into the Buckeye State.

Buckeye Trail and North Country National Scenic Trail symbols — Unsurprisingly, we kept coming across the Buckeye Trail

While a conference in Columbus anchored this trip, everything revolves around it - as does the Buckeye Trail, if you take a look at it on a map - and so did we.

Everything that goes around, comes around. So we'd like to give a shout-out to Dayton hiker Andy "Captain Blue" Niekamp, the first person to solo hike the whole Buckeye Trail.

Andy completed a thru-hike of the Florida Trail in 2019. He's the face of adventure in Ohio, something we learned more about on this trip: Ohio's outdoor adventures. Check out his website.