Author: bbpeck

Yesterday Bob and I drove 3.5 hours from Canton, Ohio, to State College, Pennsylvania, otherwise known as “Happy Valley,” home to Penn State University. It was a beautiful day for a drive and an outing once we got there.

In both Canton and State College, we stayed at Hyatt Place Hotels, a new hotel membership that Bob has gotten us to go along with the Marriott and Wyndham memberships. The Hyatt Place Hotel in State College has residences on top of the hotel, a good workout facility, great breakfast, and retail options on the ground level including Target, Planet Fitness Gym, and a restaurant. It is also very close to the Penn State campus, so we highly recommend it.

State College is one of 962 boroughs in Pennsylvania. Boroughs are smaller than cities, counties, and townships (they have both 1st class and 2nd class). State College is in Centre (how British!) County and has a population of a little over 40,000, making it the largest borough in Pennsylvania.

The Penn State mascot is the fictional Nittany Lion, named after a nearby mountain and originally coined in 1907 to seem fiercer than any other mascot at the time. Penn State competes in the Big 10 Conference, that currently has 18 schools, including Iowa and Wisconsin. So while we are unlikely to root for their sports teams, we were very impressed with their campus and the downtown area near campus.

Side note: We drove 3.25 hours today to Newtown, PA, to begin our new housesit, and the first thing we saw when we walked in was a framed photo of our homeowners with this statue. The husband is a Penn State alum.

One of our favorite parts of the campus was The Arboretum at Penn State. Opened in 2009, it is now a hub for community events and a popular garden destination. It includes 10 acres of botanic gardens and 340 acres of fields and woodlands for hiking, biking, and observing wildlife. It also is the location for one of the university’s art museums, the Palmer Museum of Art. The art museum was closed yesterday for Juneteenth, but we loved walking around some of the grounds.

Since Penn State is a big university, there is a Graduate Hotel. We had to check it out even though we were staying elsewhere.

We had a great walk through with the homeowners today before they left with their adult daughter to head to the JFK airport for their flight to Italy. More on this housesit to come.

Bob and I left the very sweet Poppet and Broad Ripple, Indiana, this morning to head to Canton, Ohio, towards our next housesit in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Poppet was definitely the cat with the sweetest disposition that we have sat for and also the frailest. We had to give her medicated lotion twice a day in her ears, which she tolerated as it was always followed by a favorite treat. While deaf, she made some really cute noises to let you know she appreciated the ear scratches.

Canton, Ohio, is currently known (if it’s known at all) as the home of the National Football League Hall of Fame. That was not our destination today. Bob has been. The current cost is $50/person, and I can guarantee you that I would not have gotten that much enjoyment out of it.

Instead, Bob and I added to our count of presidential libraries (now 12) by going to the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum. President McKinley was the nation’s 25th president and was born in a small town north of Canton but lived and worked in Canton following college. He was assassinated in 1901 during his second term in office.

While we did learn some information about the president and his wife Ida, his memorial tomb and garden is impressive, it was the worst museum in terms of content and management that we have been to. It is run by the Stark County Historical Society, and the building that houses the museum (one room and a small alcove with chairs that shows a film on loop) shares space with Stark County history exhibits (multiple rooms), a planetarium, and some kind of dinosaur exhibit. We spent much less time there than we had imagined.

Some fun facts about William McKinley. He was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843 and was the 7th of 9 children. He served 4 years in the Civil War. He moved to Canton, Ohio, following law school, where he met Ida Saxton. They were married in 1871. They had 2 daughters who both died in infancy and who are entombed with their parents in the memorial near the museum.

William McKinley, a Republican, served as County Prosecutor, Congressman, and Governor of Ohio, before beating William Jennings Bryant twice for President. The explosion of the USS Maine happened during his presidency as did the Boxer Rebellion and Spanish-American War. His first Vice President died during his first term in office. His second Vice President was Theodore Roosevelt who was sworn in as President following McKinley’s death from infection related to a bullet wound. He was shot at the 1901 World’s Fair in New York by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, at point blank range.

We didn’t go through the Stark County historical exhibits, but we checked out the gift store, and Bob found a big head in the dinosaur exhibition.

Yesterday Bob and I went to Newfields, which was just a short drive from the house, to explore this place for nature and the arts. It was a bit steep (for us) $25 a piece,but we definitely loved it. It was both great art and beautiful nature.

Newfields USA is a 152-acre cultural campus featuring the Indianapolis Museum of Art, gardens, two historic homes, performance spaces, a nature preserve, and a (in development) sculpture park.

Since I have just mentioned Robert Indiana, let me do a bit of a sidebar on him, as his most famous work is the entrance to the many exhibition halls within the museum. Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana. He was recognized at a young age for his artistic talent and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York. It was during his time in New York that he adopted Indiana as his surname to distinguish his identity in the New York art scene,

His most famous work is his LOVE sculpture, the original of which resides at IMA. See below.

The IMA has an impressive range of collections from African art to Asian art to Impressionism, Pointillism, Pop Art, glasswork, and even a design studio and fashion exhibit. I took too many pictures, but have mostly included my pictures of works that have some connection to Indiana.

First things first though, Bob did find a couple of big heads, both in the African art section. I have included the one where we remembered to get the information about it.

In order to get to the nature preserve and sculpture garden, we had to get back in the car and drive about 5 minutes up the road. Sadly, while the Virginia B. Fairbanks Nature Park is lovely, the sculpture park is still a work in progress. There were a couple of sculptures on site.

In happy family news, we learned today (06/16/26) that we have a new great niece. Jane Margaret Rohrbeck was born earlier today, and baby and parents are apparently doing well in Iowa.

For our outing today, Bob found us a lovely route to Butler University on a different, longer section of the Central Canal Towpath that we were on yesterday.

Butler University is a private university known for its liberal arts foundation, strong programs in business, pharmacy, and health, and NCAA Division I athletics (Bulldogs). Their men’s basketball often makes the March Madness competition, which is how most people outside of Indiana may know of the university. Their men’s basketball university was founded in 1855 and offers 85+ undergraduate and graduate degrees.

It is located on a 295 acre campus in a residential area about 5 miles from downtown Indianapolis. We approached the university from the canal towpath, so we first saw its baseball fields and track across from Holcomb Gardens before getting onto the main area of campus.

Note: The Holcomb name is for James Holcomb, who was a Trustee of Butler University and who co-designed the gardens that bear his name.

Bob and I started a housesit yesterday for the older but sweet Poppet. We had a great walk through with the homeowners before they headed off for an annual visit with family. They showed us how to apply lotion to the inside of Poppet’s ear twice daily for her low thyroid condition.

Our housesit is in the Indianapolis neighborhood of Broad Ripple. It is about 6 miles north of downtown and has a vibrant retail and restaurant area along the Monon Trail and Central Canal Towpath Trail. The house is a cute older home in another lovely, established neighborhood. We noted today that it is our 3rd home in a row with three livable floors. We are getting our stair climbing in!

This morning we headed to the Monon Trail to walk the few short blocks to the free Indiana Art Center.

The Monon Trail is a paved rails-to-trails walkway in Central Indiana. It runs 27 miles — from downtown Indianapolis to the northern neighborhood of Sheridan. It is popular for walking, running, and biking.

Unfortunately for us, the art center was in the process of changing over a number of galleries. We got to see the art but for the most part, didn’t have information on the artist, materials, year, etc.

The initial gallery, however, had a special exhibition called “JoeWill: Better Together,” which told the tragic story of two Indianapolis-born artists, Joe and Will Lawrence, twin brothers, who both died by suicide as young adults. The exhibition told their stories and displayed some of their art to help highlight the need for mental health resources.

From the art center, we walked back along a road to where we had first entered the Monon Trail. We then reentered the trail to walk a few blocks in the opposite direction towards Fresh Thyme Market, which is the closest grocery to the house. It is also in the heart of the Village of Broad Ripple, so we explored a bit of that as well.

We left Monon Trail to walk to the grocery store once we hit the Central Canal Towpath Trail, which runs 7.7 miles along the historic Central Canal, the primary source of drinking water for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Area.

Bob and I arrived at Starved Rock State Park near Utica, IL, late yesterday afternoon after spending a few hours with my mom in Janesville, Wisconsin. Bob and I had visited the park on a day trip from Rockford, IL, with my sister a few years ago. We enjoyed the trip and had poked around the lodge at that time and thought it would be fun to stay there.

This is that time, although we had little hope for hikes or anything outdoorsy during our stay as rain and storms were forecast for most of our time here. However, we had very little rain on our drive down and none so far today.

This morning we had coffee and breakfast in the room and then headed to the Visitors Center before hiking. Rain was still in the forecast, so we had rain gear with us. It was a muggy 80+ F.

The park is a series of overlooks of the Illinois River on the top of rocks and canyons surrounded by rocks, so we had a lot of up and down.

We returned to the room near midday and then headed to the nearby town of La Salle to visit their Illinois and Michigan Canal Visitor Center. The Visitor Center is located at Lock 16 of the I &M Canal, the western terminus. Sadly, that is about all we know, as the Visitor Center is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. We took the opportunity to walk the few blocks of the small downtown.

We tried again and headed to the Starved Rock Country Welcome Center in nearby Utica, Illinois. It was acute stop, lengthened by a friendly but overly “helpful” clerk at the Visitors Center who opted to give us lots of information and historical bits and pieces of sites that we told her we had no time to visit. Having said that, she was friendlier than most of the staff we have had interactions with at the park.

We’re chilling in our room now until dinner, which we have reservations for in the lodge dining room. Tomorrow we drive to Broad Ripple, Indiana, for an overnight in a hotel before starting our next housesit on Thursday.

Bob and I left Wauwatosa today and one of our favorite housesits. Some housesits are just special — Thornhill, Scotland, Green Valley, Arizona, Oakland, California, Cambridge, England, where the homeowners, pets, and location are all super special. We hope to do another sit in Wauwatosa.

As a catch up from the last blog, we have learned (via our homeowners) who won the $20,000 prize at the art festival.

The cats also made this housesit special. They were 4 of the cutest, softest cats ever.

Also while we were on this housesit, we were able to watch the University of Texas women win the National Softball Championship and watch the men compete to go to the Men’s College World Series. The homeowners also subscribed to Britbox, so we got to watch the “Vicar of Dibley” as well as the latest episode of “Shrinking” on Apple TV.

After a rainy day yesterday and a much needed hair appointment for me late this morning, Bob and I walked down to the Village to check out ART 64 for which our homeowners had left us information. It is the 5th year that The Village of Wauwatosa has hosted the nation’s largest bracket-style painting tournament. Over the course of two days, 64 artists paint 3 paintings live for a set period of time — 60 minutes for round 1, 75 minutes for round 2, and 90 minutes for round 3. Virtual and live spectators vote for their favorites to advance to the next round. The grand prize for this year is $20,000!

There was no cost for entry. While we were there, it was well attended, but not crowded.

Here are some of the artists and their third painting of the competition, so these are the best of the best or at least those who received the most votes to move forward.

We popped into The Village Cheese Shop while we were there.

While we didn’t do another full self-guided historical architectural tour, Bob and I did walk to the next street over to check out three mail-order homes. Mail-order homes were available from 1908-1940 through companies such as Aladdin Homes, Harris Brothers, Montgomery Ward, and Sears, Roebuck, and Company. During this period, more than 200,000 families purchased catalog homes.

Catalog companies sold homes in “kits” which typically included lumber, roofing, siding, framing, wood flooring, porch materials, finishing lumber (millwork and interior doors, trim), windows, mantels, design hardware, and paint and varnish. Kits were sold at various price levels. In 1908, Sears mail-order home prices ranged from $650 to $2,500. In 1921, the prices had increased to $460 to $5,100.

Bob and I split up today. Bob went to watch the Milwaukee Brewers play the San Francisco Giants at the nearby American Family Field. It was a gorgeous day for a baseball game — mid 80s F with very little humidity.

Sadly, although the Brewers are currently ranked first in the National League Central Division, they lost today’s game 12-9.

While Bob was at the game, I checked out the shops down in the Village and later walked to Hoyt Park, about 20 minutes from the house. Hoyt Park is known for its large pool and outdoor beer garden. It also has walking trails along the Menomonee River.

Before I get to today’s outing, Bob and I walked ourselves down into the Village of Wauwatosa (about 20 minutes) to a restaurant called Buckatabon Tavern and Supper Club. Supper clubs are a thing in Wisconsin. They began in the post-prohibition era and traditionally combined dining with entertainment to offer a full evening out experience. Now, they are mostly known for their Friday night fish fry’s, wood decor, and drinks such as a Wisconsin Old Fashioned and dessert type drinks such as Grasshoppers and Pink Squirrels. Bob and I went for their happy hour and to check out the local WI style establishment, but after reviewing the drink menu we ordered martinis instead.

We had a good chat with the friendly bartender and enjoyed seeing the restaurant and some locals.

Today, we drove about 30 minutes to River Hills, WI, through more road construction (The Milwaukee area is working on its roads!) to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, which I had seen mentioned in the April edition of the “Milwaukee” magazine that the homeowners have. The sculpture garden is a 40 acre outdoor museum featuring over 50 sculptures set in a natural setting of gardens, woodland, and a small lake. It is free to visit. It was lovely to walk around, as the setting is just as nice as the artwork. The artwork is primarily metal based, and sadly for Bob, did not contain any big heads. Since we came on a Wednesday, we were able to see the bonsai exhibition as well.

A couple of samples of the many bonsai on display.