A sunny October day in Ohio... What more could a man hope for?  We had one free day in the midst of our conferences -- and we made the most of it.  The day started off at the H2O Fall Get-Away in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in the middle of beautiful fall colors.  Just stepping outside of the cabin to start the day, my heart was filled with gratitude for such a day...

Perhaps the most perfect way that such a fall day could be initiated was with shooting some baskets while the sun rose from behind the beautiful forest.

I even managed to sink a shot, synchronized to perfection with the camera's timed setting!

Shooting baskets by myself has always been one of my favorite ways to think and relax and enjoy physical and mental stimulation.  Starting off the day in this way was soooooooo nice...

I was especially blessed to hang out with some good friends from Bowling Green at the Fall Get-Away.  Furthermore, I got to introduce some of my Amsterdam friends to my Bowling Green friends and vice versa.  Somehow, I feel that it helps people to know me better if they can meet people from the "other half" of my life straddling the Atlantic Ocean.

It's hard to beat a chance to chew the fat with Jason Slack.  If only the time could have been longer.  Eventually, though, we needed to head on our way back to Cincinnati...

Before getting back to Cincinnati, however, the girls in the van convinced me into stopping at the world's largest flea market:  Trader's World, conveniently located just off of I-75, on the northern rim of Cincinnati.  It was a very bizarre place...

Ariënne, Eva, Marie Christine, and Naomi enjoyed trying on some vintage sunglasses in one of the stalls at Trader's World.

There was a little bit of everything to see at the flea market -- including rows of doll's heads, eerily arranged with their eyes facing outwards.  In the end, I was actually glad that we decided to stop.  It was such a unique spectacle.  So uniquely American!

Right next to Trader's World was a church with a giant fiberglass statue of Jesus, with his arms outstreched toward heaven.  It was absolutely massive (if you look around the cross in the above photograph, you can see the four Amsterdammers posing with their arms outstretched, to give you some sense of the scale).  Something about the setting -- right next to the interstate highway, immediately transposed with the spectacular consumerism of Trader's World -- combined with the sheer monstrosity of the statue itself and its bland dairy coloring led us to dub the statue "Cheesus."

Such a bizarre setting... Ohio has so many interesting facets.