Dawes Arboretum

We've made the nearly 1,000-mile journey along Interstate 70 from our home in Connecticut to my wife's childhood stomping grounds in Terre Haute, Indiana, numerous times, and on this trek, to attend her 50th high school reunion, I had it in the back of my mind that we'd stop at the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio, for a leg-stretching visit. We'd been there once before, and though that excursion was perhaps 20 years ago, it still stands out in my memory. I recall it as a beautiful public garden, some 1,800 acres in size and filled with gorgeous plants and hiking trails. My memory is no longer completely reliable, but when it came to Dawes, I got all the details right. When we arrived in early afternoon, the weather was threatening rain, but we roamed the trails anyway. I had only the briefest time for photography before a shower mandated that I put the camera in its waterproof case, but the Japanese Garden, however fast I had to snap pictures, required very little exposure time for me to capture its serenity.