Fun things to do in Ohio

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Columbus was founded in 1812 for the purpose of becoming the capital of the sate, and it became Ohio's capital city just four years later, in 1816. It wasn't until 1834 that the population of the town topped 3,500 people.

Today Columbus is the third largest city in Ohio, and is home to the Ohio State University as well as a number of Fortune 500 companies. The Ohio Statehouse was completed in 1857 and it remains the seat of state government.

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Ohio's state government relocated from Chillicothe to Columbus in 1816, initially occupying a small building at High and State Streets. As the government grew, a new capitol building was needed, and construction began in 1839. In true Ohio fashion, work was delayed for various reasons, until the temporary capitol building burned to the ground, and they desperately needed the new facility. The present capitol building, called the Ohio Statehouse, was complete in 1857. Well, almost completed.... I think they forgot the dome over the rotunda.

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Dayton is a city of about 165,000 people in southwestern Ohio, not too far from Cincinnati. Much of Dayton's history and commerce has centered on the aviation industry which got it start here in the Wright Brothers hometown in 1904 and continued with the development of massive Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The city was founded in 1796, incorporated in 1810, and named after signer of the US Constitution Jonathan Dayton (though he never set foot in the city, Dayton received his name because he once owned some 250,000 acres here).

National Cash Register, headquartered in Dayton since the 1880s, announced in 2009 it was moving out of the state. Events like this cause Forbes to name Dayton, along with Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo on a list of America's fastest dying cities. The largest local employers today are Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (some 25,000 employees), Premier Health Partners (14,000), Kettering Health Network (8,000), and Wright State University (3,000).

The area's major attractions include the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, and the SunWatch Indian Village/Archaeological Park. There are also several historic neighborhoods, most notably the Oregon District.

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Wright Patterson is the Air Force's premier location for technology development and flight engineering. The base is home to eight Air Force "wings," as well as the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Aeronautical Systems Center, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command. The airfield was established by the Wright Brothers in 1904, and was named after them and Lt. Frank Stuart Patterson, pilot and member of an influential local family that owned the National Cash Register company. More recently, the base was the location for negotiations of the so-called Dayton Accords or Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War in 1995.

Most importantly, the base was the storage and research area for the UFO that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico. Hanger 18 was the location for this UFO, and possibly the bodies of two or three aliens. The technology was reverse engineered and used in various US aircraft such as the stealth fighter and bomber, as well as other high-tech aircraft that are still top secret.

The Air Force Museum is on Wright-Patterson AFB, and it is one of the finest aircraft museums anywhere. Billed as the world's oldest and largest aircraft museum, the National Museum of the United States Air Force has some 400 aircraft on display. The museum was started in 1923 in Dayton and it has moved across town since its inception. Some of the most impressive aircraft on display are the world's only XB-70 Valkyrie, the B-29 which dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the first Air Force One Presidential aircraft, and B-2 and F-117 stealth aircraft.

The museum is visited by about one million people each year, and is actually considered one of the biggest attractions in all of Ohio... which is not surprising.

The Dayton Art Institute was founded in 1919 as the Dayton Museum of Fine Arts. Its works were originally housed in a downtown mansion. However, in 1930 the museum moved to a new building in its present location. Its name was later changed to the Dayton Art Institute to acknowledge the importance of its art school in addition to the museum.

The museum's collection contains over 20,000 pieces spanning 5,000 years. It features an impressive Asian collection that includes works from Japan, China, Tibet, Southeast Asia, India, and Persia; seventeenth-century Baroque paintings; American art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and a large collection of contemporary art. Artists represented in the museum's collection of paintings include Claude Monet, Edward Hopper, and Andy Warhol.

The Dayton Art Institute is housed in a 60,000-square-foot (5,574-square-meter) building designed by architect Edward Green. The design of the Italian Renaissance-style building was based on the Casino in the gardens of the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, Italy. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Founded in 1881, the Cincinnati Art Museum is oldest art museum west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its collection of over 60,000 works of art is the largest in Ohio, and one of the largest in the Midwest.

The Romanesque-Revival building that houses the museum was designed by Cincinnati architect James McLaughlin, and opened in 1886. Since then, several major additions have significantly increased the size of the museum. The most recent addition was the Cincinnati Wing which contains 15 galleries and opened in 2003. The 18,000-square-foot (1,672-square-meter) wing features over 400 works of Cincinnati artists dating from 1788 to the present.

The Cincinnati Art Museum contains a total of 118 galleries which exhibit paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, costumes, and musical instuments spanning the last 5,000 years. The collections include American, European, and Asian works of art.

The museum's art collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. Other exhibits include dozens of pieces of Rookwood pottery, Persian architecture dating from 480 B.C., marble carvings dating from 2,500 to 2,400 B.C., and one of the world's best collections of Nabataean art and Jin Dynasty wood carvings.

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I visited NASA's John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field back in 1987 when it was still called Lewis Research Center. The research center, one of ten major NASA research sites, is located at the Cleveland Airport, not far from Cleveland. The facility was established in 1942 and named for NASA pioneer George W. Lewis in 1948. GRC had a role in a number of key events in the history of space exploration such as Project Mercury, the Apollo Program, Mir Space Station, and the Mars Pathfinder Rover.

The Glenn Research Center used to have a visitors center, with a number of displays from the history of the space program, but it was closed in 2009.

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I was greatly impressed by the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. We spent every bit of 4 hours inside and didn't get to see everything in detail nor did we spend any time in the large gift shop or outside.

There are hundreds of aircraft inside chronicling everything from the birth of flight ("Wright" Brothers), through early aircraft, through the use of aircraft in the World Wars, to the Cold War and to today. There are even some Predator drones and missiles on display. Rumor has it that the Museum is going to try and get one of the space shuttles when they are officially retired.

It can get pretty crowded inside. A lot of visitors and boy scout groups; however, there is plenty of room and plenty of things to see. You may even get to see aircraft taking off at the Air Base outside.

This is definitely one of Ohio's best museums and worth the time. Oh, and the ADMISSION IS TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY FREE!!! You can pay extra to see an IMAX or to take a brief simulation, but otherwise it is free. You can't beat that.