Sites of Cincinnati #4

Sites of Cincinnati #4:
Race Road

Race Road happens to be one of my favorite drives in all of Cincinnati.  There are other roads that bring you gorgeous trees on both sides, transporting you to a seasonal paradise (Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard).  Or that hug the river for miles out from downtown Cincinnati, and take you through cute, historic towns and gorgeous vistas (State Route 50).  Or roads that give you spectacular views of the Cincinnati skyline (I-75 North, at the cut in the hill -- that's another Site of Cincinnati entry).  Race Road offers none of those things.

But it does have a few things that make it mundanely spectacular.  For one, if you want to get from my house to the Bridgetown area, and you don't want to drive the congested main roads, then you can take West Fork to Race.  You don't lose any time, and you also get to experience ...

some of the best hills in all of Cincinnati.  In fact, I mentioned to my father (who hasn't lived in Cincinnati for over 30 years) that there was this really hilly road that I loved to drive and he said, "Is it Race Road?"  Why, yes.  Yes, it is.  One time, we were caravaning with Rob's family to a local restaurant.  Rob was in the lead and decided to take his family on Race Road, just to make them want to pee their pants.  They're all from Farmland, OH, which is flatter than ... something that's really flat ... so Rob took Race faster than normal.  I was in the van with most of his other family and they all screeched and said things like, "Is Rob trying to kill us?"  It was great fun.


The other thing that makes Race Road fantastic is the road view.  Road view means, like, when you're driving through Nevada and the road is straight for miles and miles, and then you hit a mountain with a slow rise, and you can see the highway going straight, straight, straight up the mountain, and then at the last minute it makes a bend and exits out of sight.  That's a great road view.

At one point on Race Road, you're at the top of a hill, and when you look across to the top of the next hill, you can see the road again, and it's lined up almost perfectly with the orientation of the road on the hill that you're on.  But in between, the road is lost behind trees going down into a small valley.  And you know the road is the same on both sides, and you know the road will do something in between, but you don't know what.

In point of fact, under those trees, the road goes in crazy turns that you have to take super slow, because the road is also at super steep angles.  And you wouldn't expect that from the view you had at the top of the hill. 

And then when you're at the top of the next hill, you can look back and see the start of it all, on the hill you were just at.

Every time I take Race Road, I look ahead and note the end.  And then, at the end, I look back and note the beginning.  Because there's something exquisitely beautiful about a road with a set end and beginning, but an unknown middle.  It's like birth and death, the only two definite points on our life's journey. 

You're born, and you're young, and the only thing you can ever know for sure is that you'll someday die.  And there's all this middle section of sharp turns and craziness.  And then, when you're at the end of it all, you can look back and you can see the distant past, and the turbulent middle, and you know that it's made you who you are.  And you can start to make sense of the twists and turns that your life took.  And you know, too, that the very end of the hill is coming.  You aren't quite sure what's on the other side, but it's all okay anyway.

And that's why Race Road is one of my favorite drives in all of Cincinnati.