Sunday, in the Park

Sunday morning finds your two travelers on the near-empty streets of Columbus. Perhaps the oppressive heat was keeping people indoors, or maybe they were all glued to their radios listening to Earnest Angely.  Whatever it was, we were grateful, as it made it easy to park right near our first monument -- for me a definite highlight of the trip -- the world's largest gavel.

Gavel trivia - the object against which a gavel is struck is called a sounding block.

The gavel is a public art sculpture next to the Supreme Court of Ohio and all I can say about it is -- wow, that's a big hammer.

After a quick look at Ohio's unimpressive statehouse -- sorry, but I drive by the Pennsylvania Capitol Building on a regular basis, Ohio will have to do a lot better to impress me -- we drove a few blocks to the Topiary Garden which is attached to Ohio's School for the Deaf.

The garden is a reproduction-in-flora of the well known painting by Georges Seurat:

As seen in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The garden itself was very impressive, although naturally some of the... I know this isn't the right word for it but I'm at a loss now... shrubbery, didn't grow in completely. In any case, the garden was very beautiful and we probably would have stayed a good deal longer except that the sun was beating down upon us.  There wasn't a lot of tree cover or shade, and like so many before us, we were feeling the call to go westward.  We did manage to get these amazing pictures... as always, you can click on them to embiggen them if you'd like:

As I can upload more pictures, I will create a new page just for this garden, because it was pretty awesome.

 So we headed off toward... Springfield!  But I'm sending you to Chicago: