Airing my Philthy Laundry

Sandusky, Ohio...The Armpit of America (but still only 5 inches from the heart)

So I spent one glorious week in Sandusky, OH...and let me tell you, it was amazing. I'll take you through the highlights of the week with some pictures. Most of the hilarious moments are unfortunately not caught on film as I did not have my camera with me at the time. I'm still new at this photo-documentary thing, so I promise I'll try to get better.

Sandusky is a town that thrives on it's summer tourism...in the county during the year, there are about 80,000 inhabitants, from May-September, that number jumps to over 1,000,000. Mostly due to the Erie Islands, and Cedar Point

(Drive by pic of Cedar Point)
This amusement park boasts the worlds tallest, and fastest roller coaster...one of about 15 at the park. You can tell how great it is because Snoopy is jumping up and down in front of those pole things...where else does that happen??

As you can imagine, everyone in this town thinks this park is God's little gift to the area, and tries to bring it up in normal conversation. Example...I'm at a restaurant and I ask the waitress what she recommends. To that she responds, "The burgers here are really good. The only better ones are at Cedar Point...have you been there yet? It's amazing. I love Cedar Point. Go Roller Coasters!!!

I also heard a lot of "It's a shame you didn't come here when Cedar Point is open. It's totally crazy, you know it has the best roller coasters in the world, don't you?

By Monday night, I was already sick of hearing about Cedar Point, and was hoping a giant earthquake would send the whole peninsula floating through the Great Lakes until it reached the Atlantic, and then sank to the bottom of the sea...then the whole town could just wither and die, and the world would be a better place...but i digress.

For my job, I get to go out and sell advertising space to a wide array of businesses. I wish I had a picture of this one guy, who owned and operated a Oil Change Place...he was a classic. He, of course had a mullet, and had only 1 bottom tooth...ONE!!! After further inspection I found that his top teeth were fake, so this one jagged curved bottom tooth was the only one he could still take credit for. I started to wonder what caused his teeth to fall out. Was it the 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes he smoked per day? Did it just make the mullet look better so he pulled them out? After a while I came up with the answer...Taffy. Impossible to resist, and it erodes your teeth with the best of them. He probably got it at Cedar Point, since they have the best taffy in all the world there.

Here is the pic of the knot I had in my tie one day...not to shabby. I normal struggle with a good knot, so when I popped this baby out on the first try, I was needless to say, delighted


Anyway, back to Sandusky. There's another phenomenon there that I have never seen anywhere in my travels. Everywhere you go there are these Neon Palm Trees.

At bars, at restaurants, in front of T-shirt shops. I think there must be some sort of Nuclear plant somewhere that had a major leak and turned all these trees into the fluorescent glowing beauties they are. Or maybe the locals are just trying to make summer last as long as possible since that's when their Mecca is up and running. I actually heard that if you live in Sandusky, you have to pray to Snoopy 5 times a day and face Cedar Point...strange.

Now this final story sums up the people of Sandusky perfectly. There was this lady at the office I was working with who kept raving about the little toy her husband had made...she pulls it out, and it's a ball in a box carved out of a carrot...I'm not kidding people. Her husband, the genius that he is, figured out how to carve a carrot into a box with a ball of carrot inside of it. She kept it in a little plastic bag and showed it to everyone that walked in the door. But the worst of it was that people were astonished by it. "How did he do that?" they asked. Insane. I wish I had a pic of it, but sadly I don't. I'm not doing this thing justice by describing it, but take my word for it...it's not as amazing as they thought it was. It's a friggin carrot!!!

Anyway, thus concludes my dialogue on Sandusky. I hope you enjoyed it.
I was supposed to be off to California, but plans changed, so I'm off for the week and hanging out in Chi-Town. I'll try to snap some interesting pics of the locals...they're all swarming around this time of year.

Stay tuned...

posted by philthy @ 5:49 PM