The other place to get your kicks

There's a road that goes from Maryland to Illinois that has a story that kind-of reminds me of Route 66. However, it's much older than Route 66. It wasn't designed for cars, it was the first developed route West out of the original 13 states. 

I didn't start out with exploring this road in mind on my second day of travels. My idea was to visit the Zanesville Museum of Art, but they were closed that day in order to participate in a local arts festival. My next planned stop was Vasehenge, an attraction I found on roadsideamerica.com that dates from a community art event in 2008 involving 100 huge vases (taller than I am) that were painted and installed around the city. The pictures of the vases I saw online were from when they were shiny and bright and new, but nowadays the vases at Vasehenge have been exposed to the elements for over a decade and have become faded. The sky was sure picturesque, though!

If you look closely behind Vasehenge in that photo, the poles with flowers hanging from them mark the Y Bridge. They must really like their Y-shaped bridge in Zanesville because they're on their fifth one. They've built and rebuilt it a total of 5 times as older models deteriorated. I was planning to check it out after visiting Vasehenge, when all of a sudden I was at a traffic light that had only two options, a right turn or a left turn, and I was on the bridge!

There was limited parking close to the installation, and this interesting building was next to where I parked:

At this point I figured I might as well just drive to the next town where I was planning to stay overnight, because I wasn't seeing much to interest me in Zanesville. A few miles outside of town, something caught my eye by the side of the road and I took the next exit. On my way there, yet another thing caught my eye -- a sign advertising the National Road / Zane Gray museum -- and I diverted my course again. I stopped and looked it up online and the description reminded me of historic Route 66, so I decided to stop. As a bonus, I found another giant vase there that has been shaded and is in better condition:

Inside the museum is more pottery. Zanesville pottery is a thing (and that's the explanation for the giant vases as opposed to, say, giant sheep, like they have in San Angelo, Texas: https://vanishingpointkm.blogspot.com/2018/03/how-did-you-find-your-way-to-san-angelo.html). They have some nice pottery in the museum, but a lot of it is rather oddly displayed close to the floor and behind glass. That makes it hard to photograph. However, the 150 foot diorama of the history of the National Road is another matter. OMG, whoever created that is a very talented artist! My favorite scene is this one, where the miniature figurines of livestock walk right up to the back wall and blend with the painted images of livestock on the wall. I'm including a photo that shows the whole scene, and then a close-up of just the livestock:

Here are a couple of more scenes from the diorama:

This museum also houses exhibits about the life and work of Zane Gray. Zanesville and Zane Gray were both named for his grandfather, whose last name was Zane. If you ask about it at the museum, you'll really get them talking!

Final thought for Day Two: I really appreciate the back-up camera I had installed in my van a couple of months ago. Not only can I parallel park the thing now, but I can get myself out of situations that would have seemed impossible without it. Such as yesterday when I was trying to see an historic S bridge from the old National Highway (like the one in the picture just above) and I wound up on a one-lane dead-end road and had to turn around by backing uphill into someone's driveway. Hooray for back-up cameras! 

Why did they build S bridges? Wikipedia has all the details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_bridge, but the gist of it is that with curvy streams and uneven terrain, roads are not likely to cross streams perpendicularly, but the arch that supports the bridge is strongest if it does cross perpendicularly.