We thoroughly enjoyed a spring day trip last Saturday to New Concord, Ohio with our first stop for lunch at Scott’s Diner. My husband selected the mushroom, onion, & swiss burger and I chose the signature open faced chili cheeseburger made with Texas toast and topped with Scott’s signature house-made award-winning chili and diced red onion. Both burgers were made with fresh, never frozen, all beef patties. Diner fries came with my husband’s burger and I decided to have their large delicious onion rings. We were so full that we skipped dinner…lol!

Nearby, we drove over to the John & Annie Glenn Museum, which pays tribute to astronaut and senator John Glenn and his beloved wife and best friend, Annie Glenn. Much of the museum consists of John Glenn’s home while he was growing up. The house has been restored to the time John lived there until he enlisted in World War II. Parts of the museum have been added to the house. Two teenage tour guides informed us of the history and one of them was an actress, who played the role of John Glenn’s daughter. We were very impressed with these young ladies and how informative they were. They were actually better than many adult tour-guides we have encountered in various museums through the years! John Glenn was definitely a person who went after what he wanted and did what it took to get there. It was quite interesting to learn about the first American to orbit the Earth and how he got the chance to go to space again while in his 70s; he became the oldest person to go to space. We made sure to get the astronaut stamp on our passport as The Ohio History Connection owns the museum. They offer these passport booklets for free to encourage visiting all of their historical sites throughout Ohio. We opted to not only visit the John & Annie Glenn Museum, but also the National Road & Zane Grey Museum, which is only a five- minute drive to Norwich; we got to visit two museums for twenty dollars. To refuel before heading to the second museum, we walked over to the literal coffee house next door, Chapman’s Coffee House.

The cherry blossom iced chai, which included vanilla, was delicious and we were refreshed as we drove on to visit the National Road & Zane Grey Museum. We learned that Zane Grey (novelist, hunter who became conservationist, etc…) and Route 40 (the National Road or “the Main Street of America”) have origins in Zanesville, Ohio as it’s the birthplace of Zane Grey and Rt. 40 runs through Zanesville. Also, Zane Grey was a descendent of Colonel Ebenezer Zane, a frontiersman, who was the founder of Zanesville and he was contracted to build the original Nation Road route. We enjoyed the exhibits as they covered the history of the National Road, its construction and transportation, which included wagons, bicycles, and cars. Scenes of wax figures representing travelers staying in homes along the route, as well as later a depiction of Zane Grey in his writing den really evoked the history visually. Lastly, there are examples of art pottery as the area was famous for this craft in the 20th century. We selected a couple of old copies of Zane Grey books from the museum along with a Rt. 40 magnet from the museum. The pottery that we viewed at the end of the exhibits inspired us to visit the Zanesville Pottery store, where we picked up a few unique items. On the way, we stopped at a couple of antique stores and saw a White Pillars Christmas House that we will visit at some point in the future. It was a beautiful spring day trip to walk through history and art.