Hicksville, OH????!

The other day, I was reading Sunita's blog and discovered someone was visiting from Hicksville, Ohio. I googled it and discovered Hicksville is in northwest Ohio on the Indiana border. I thought it was pretty interesting, but I also noted that Sunita has readers from less than an hour away from me in Richmond, Indiana.

Imagine my surprise that when I added the gadget that Sunita uses to track visitors, that I was "Hicksville, OH".

Now Troy has a log of quaint things, like the covered bridge on Eldean Road which you can see here...and they have a strawberry festival the first weekend in June every year, but "Hicksville?" I don't think so.

Ok, so maybe other towns don't put red dye in their fountains to celebrate the strawberry festival (this is the fountain at the center of Troy, in the middle of a rotary aka round-about). Maybe other towns don't paint the parade route and people's driveways with monster strawberries for the festival.

But, Troy does have a lot going for it. It's just a town of about 26,000 just north of Dayton. Yes, there's a lot of farming which goes on around here. But there's also some very high tech industries here--a robotics facility, a Honda plant, Hobart Manufacturing and the Hobart Welding school which is internationally acclaimed.

We're heavy on Mexican restaurants, light on Chinese, and have a really wonderful Italian restaurant which rivals some of the best I went to in Connecticut.

We have an airplane museum which commemorates the Waco aircraft which also hosts a fly in every August. We have a cultural center, which is small, but does a lot for this little town. There's a Foundation which was set up by the local "Captains of Industry" in the late 19th and early 20th century which donates a lot of money for cultural enrichment and the preservation of the town.

Heck....every 4 years candidates come to Troy. You could have seen Joe Biden here, and Sarah Palin...George W. Bush ate hamburgers at K's Restaurant which hasn't changed much from the 1950s.

Presently, there's an outdoor exhibition of sculptures sponsored by the Troy Foundation. There's a movie theatre dedicated to art films in addition to another regular cinema.

I'm not a native, in fact, I've only lived here for 4 years. It's not for nothing that Troy was voted one of Ohio's best hometowns. Ohio isn't just a "fly-over state" and Troy certainly isn't "Hicksville."