Day 7

Got woken up at 7am by a dog barking in the corridor outside our room. It carried on barking for a least a minute really loudly. Most disappointing thing was this disrupted a dream I was having where I was trying to teach a duck to play a recorder. The problem it was having was its beak was so hard it couldn't create a seal around the mouth piece.

Managed to go back to sleep and this time woke up in the midst of trying to get to my car in a car park which was going to be caught in a flood. It was 8.30am, so decided to get up and not have anymore weird dreams.

We went to our first hotel breakfast of the trip. There was a waffle machine so I made one. Whilst it was cooking I went to get cutlery. There were no plastic forks. Spoke to lady on reception. She went off to get some more but came back saying there won't any. She told me to go ghetto style and use the back end of a fork. Which I did.

We had no rush as we only had one thing properly planned and that didn't open until 11am. Eventually we headed out and made our way a short distance northwards to the Ohio State Reformatory. Arrived just after 11am and made our way in. Picked up our self guided tour audio guides and set off.

The only reason we were here was because a few months ago when initially planning the trip I realised that this was where the Shawshank Redemption was filmed and that you could go in and walk around. We were going to heading past on our journey, so we put in a stop so we could see it.

I'm not going to write masses as the pictures will do the talking. It opened in 1896 and stopped being a prison in 1990. It is gradually being restored back to its former self having fallen into disrepair. Money raised through tourism is being put back in to fund the restoration. You start the tour in the parts that have been restored, offices, etc and then make your way into the cell blocks.

Shawshank

Warden's office

The actual safe!

Andy's office

Red's costume

Brooks was here

The sewer Andy crawled through

The actual tin found by Red

The tunnel from Andy's cell

One of the two cell blocks

We then had lunch in the cafe. Whilst in there a loud beeping started and just kept going. We presumed it was some sort of alarm on the kitchen equipment. Then a man who had been queuing at the till sat on a table behind us and I said to Ann I think its him making the noise. The lady at the till then obviously had the same idea and then asked him if he had one of the electronic audio guides. He took it out of his pocket and it was making a racket. You are meant to drop them off before you leave the last area otherwise an alarm goes off. She turned it off. He said 'I could hear the noise but didn't realise it was me!' Not sure how he couldn't hear it was him. We then went to the shop and got a magnet but also my first t-shirt of the trip. Had to really, couldn't pass up the opportunity.

Once we were back in the car it was after 3pm. We discussed if there was anything else we wanted to do. There are some other sites from the movie you can drive and find, but the most famous, the oak tree, has long since been blown down in storms. We decided that with a long drive tomorrow that we would call it a day. Nipped in to Walmart and then headed to our room. Swimming pool in the hotel is shut so we couldn't even do that.

Getting to write the blog really early as it is only 6.45pm. Feeling quite smug about that.

Managed to find that Shawshank is currently available on Netflix in France, so using a VPN, the laptop and an HDMI cable that I brought with me, we could watch the film to celebrate the day.

States visited - 4