Rinnah and Noah waiting for our order at the White Turkey

Nathan with Julie and Jessica – they took us to the beach!

Noah learning what it means to have siblings and Toby loving it – they took turns burying each other all afternoon.

Noah trying fishing for the first time at Doctor Dan and Stevie’s lake

The innocuous looking bookcase in the living room

Wait, what?! It’s a secret staircase?! The kids did triple takes – this house is super cool!

The writhing pile of fish.

Aren’t they cute? Um, in a creepy, fishy kind of way?

Every once in a while I get to go back to a place that’s I have some real history with, and it’s always a blessing. This past weekend, I was back up in Kingsville, OH, at a small Baptist church which has been absolutely lovely to me for many years. They are one of the first churches to ever have me in, and I love that I get to go back and check in with them all every few years and feel like the pastor’s family are personal friends at this point. I mean, back when I was first starting out, I actually had a pretty major car incident getting to this church, and they had my car towed during the concert I was giving (that’s a whole story in and of itself!). When I came back a week later to pick my car up, I found out that the church had done a love offering to cover the repairs for me because they knew we had no way to cover it at that time, even though many of them had nothing to spare either. This is that kind of church.

Well, they are up right on the edge of Lake Erie, so we decided to take the family and just have a fun couple of days before and after. Because of Noah’s surgery, we really can’t plan any kind of vacation, so we’re just taking advantage of the times we can get together. 🙂

We drove up Saturday morning and met Julie and Jessica, Pastor Dave’s wife and one of his daughter’s (he was traveling in from out of state) and they took us to a local hangout – the White Turkey, which has been there unchanged since the 1950’s. And it totally felt like the 1950’s! It was so cute, and the kids had a blast eating outside and getting happy face ice cream cones. Afterwards, Julie and Jess took us to the beach on Lake Erie which the kids loved.

There are not really any hotels near the church, so Doctor Dan and his wife Stevie offered to host us for the night. We headed over there for dinner and had no idea what we were in for – their house is magical! They have a lake and a zip line, Noah tried fishing for the first time, and there was even a secret door in the bookcase to get up to the room our girls stayed in! They couldn’t have been any nicer, and as Julie promised us, they were “super fun!”

The next morning I did most of the service at the church, and it was so fun to reconnect with people I’ve been with many times. We realized that with all my visits, this was the first time any of the kids had been here, so there were many people who were excited to meet them. After the service they hosted a little lunch for the members of the worship teams and I did a little teaching session about worship, etc, and had a q&a time.

Then our family headed out, but before going home, we had to see Pymatuning Lake. I had never heard of this before, but when I was in Omaha last month, one of the men on the tech team was adamant that we had to see this! He couldn’t believe that I was from Ohio and didn’t know about Pymatuning! It is a lake which had carp get in somehow, but since there are no natural predators and no one wants to eat carp, they’ve just multiplied and multiplied, and people throw them bread and watch them fight over it. I know. It doesn’t sound all that great, but he told me I had to see it! And we were already pretty close, so we headed over, bought old bread at the “Pymatuning Visitor’s Center” which turned out to be a wood case labeled “Fish Bread – 2 for $1” on the side of the road next to a biker bar, and went to experience it. The tag line for the town it’s in is “Where the Ducks Walk on the Fish” because apparently the fish are so thick the ducks can walk on them. We did not personally witness this – we saw ducks who were clearly concerned for their feet keeping about 30 feet back from the writhing pile of fish waiting for bread by the walkway. Our family has re-named this experience “the writhing pile of fish.”

Well, I was relieved to see that there was a lot more water than the pictures implied, so those fish definitely could swim away at any time. And there was an impressive amount of fish. And an impressive amount of stale bread being thrown in by an impressive number of people. It was weirdly fascinating. And at one point Noah rolled some bread in his hands to make it more of a ball so he could throw it farther and threw it at a duck – when the duck went to get it, a carp came up at the same time to try for it and we definitely saw a duck and a carp kissing in Lake Pymatuning. So that was pretty special. We may not drive here again, but we’re all happy we’ve seen it, and if you’re on the northern border of Ohio and PA, you can’t miss the writhing pile of fish. 🙂

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