HOMETOWN TOURIST

We call em "Staycations" . They were popular in really bad times when summer rentals were not part of many folks budgets.

Most any area has many delightful sights and places of historical, artistic, and scientific interest.
In the Brandywine area there I a museum of Wyeth and Pyle and(to a limited extent) Pre-Raphaelite work. This summer they are having aseris of shows and one, in particular are works of the Maine cost by Jamie Wyeth and Rockwell Kent.

The idiot re-enactors are up at Gettysburg and Wrightsville (for the annual bridge burning) . The radio said that today there were about 50000 tourists and 10000 re-enactors ). Imagine all these guys in wool uniforms and sleeping in pup tents .
The Irish brigade was true all the way down to the ambulance of "select beverages " for the Union soldiers

If ya seen one buncha reenactors, you've fulfilled your obligation to the experience.

My dad took me to the whole Gettysburg 100th anniversary re-enactment. We wandered around Kulps Hill and the fileds around where Picketts boys would "charge" and then my dad, wise man that he was , said.
"Lets get the hell out of here and get some ice cream"
To this day,in his honor, I have avoided anything that was titled "re-enactment" They do a Battle of the Brandywine every year and all it does is boost the sales of mushrooms to the tourists who think that Kennet Square mushrooms taste differently than those grown in a cave in California.

The people who clean up on that stuff are the people who sell those goofballs their equipment--the wool uniforms, the canteens, haversacks, etc. The real fanatics get wool and make their own homespun, but there's huge industry to sell these items to the reenactors. A guy i know in North Carolina, in the days before computers in homes were common, did some digging and found an Italian company that makes a reproduction of the Lee-Enfield Pattern 1853 rifled musket. Later, he was ready to kick himself because the repro-boys have such a demand that they actually sell their guns for more than it would cost to pick up a Pattern 1853 original (apparently, thousands of items, including the Pattern 1853, were amassed from what is known as the Nepalese cache, sell offs of old, old equipment from Nepal).

Anyhoo, people are cleaning up on the reenactors. I went once, to the Bentonville reenactment in North Carolina. It was fascinating , and once was enough. Unlike something like Gettysburg, the place isn't overrun, so it's not the freak show that i've heard other people describe. I still had no interest in a second run through.

Museums. Within a 50 mile radius of us, Ill bet there are over 50 museums and another 20 art galleries.
We have everything from the "Crayola" museum to the "Mutter" museum, where a med college hs a collection of anatomical parts from dead folks. The famous. the infamous, and the just plain weird.
Martin mYlins gun shop, where the Pa long rifle was first fabricated for the Continental.

I used to work in Zanesville for Oglebay Norton. Id stay in Columbus and visit the Western Art museum and the Museum of Science and the Parks built around the various "Mounds" .

I lived in Ohio longer than i lived in any other place in my life, but i never visited any of the mounds. COSI (Central Ohio Science and Industry [museum]) was somewhere i walked past going to work every day for years--not some place i visited.

You have my deepest sympathy for having lived in Zanesville.

Zanesville was not dismal, it had some neat areas.However, I couldn't think of a "Staycation" in that entire area of Ohio like we could here in the central Valley of PA. We are within a 70 mile radius of Philly, Baltimore, the Appalachians, and the beaches of the Chesapeake and Delaware.
However, I feel like this part of the colonies is a museum rather than a vibrant area.