I couldn't resist.

Ever since a young woman named Ashley came to work for us here at Matt Mendelsohn World Headquarters, we've teased her mercilessly about her deep and abiding love for her hometown of Defiance, Ohio. Yes, Ashley says "pop" instead of soda. Yes, she once got me all excited about watching a blurry, streaming internet feed of the Tinora High School basketball team playing in the state championship, even though I still can't tell you where Tinora is. No, she never complains about walking to the Metro in the cold, despite repeated attempts to give her a ride. Yes, Ashley can rattle off facts and figures about the role that Fort Defiance played during the years after the French and Indian Wars and leading up to the War of 1812. And yes, it is true that pretty much the only thing you'll see on the couple of hour drive from Cleveland to Defiance is corn, more corn and soybeans.

But underneath all the teasing, I know it's very important to love the place where you grew up. I make a lot of jokes about the Long Island of my youth (how can you not laugh at a place that names a shopping mall after Walt Whitman? But of course!) but I still have fond and deep-rooted memories of my childhood. Perhaps it's a nostalgia for everything that Old Bethpage was before I was born: endless potato farms, a one-room schoolhouse, roads named after swamps. So we jumped at the chance to take a long drive to the Buckeye state for Ashley's marriage to Cory Hornish. There comes a time when you have to stop teasing and admit that maybe you're just a little jealous.

And so we hooked up the covered wag--er, car--and drove ten hours across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Like the early settlers, the Jetta was loaded down with bags of Sun Chips, coolers filled with Diet Dr. Pepper, and a GPS we refer to as Nuvi. (I'll say one thing for those pioneers: at least they never had to listen to a computer with a British accent constantly and annoyingly repeat the word "recalculating" every time they stopped for a bathroom break.) After some advice from a friend, we opted for a slightly longer drive on I-68, through Maryland and West Virginia, thereby bypassing the endless construction zones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Enough with these stimulus funds already! The road was always interesting and curvy, not like driving I-95 down South, and there were hardly any trucks. It was much easier than I thought.

By the time we got back into Pennsylvania and onto I-79, we decided to stop for lunch in the little city of Washington. It reminded me a lot of the sweet-though-faded towns in upstate New York, where I went to school. Our iPhone told us that the most popular place to eat in Washington was a place called Shorty's Lunch, serving hot dogs the same way for over 75 years. Between you and me, after all those years I'd have thought they would have figured out a way to make those hot dogs taste a lot better than they do. But maybe I'm quibbling. Chili from a can is fine, I suppose, as long as the luncheonette it is served in has that requisite ancient feel. And Shorty's has that in spades.

From there it was on to Cleveland. We told Alexandra that there was a rule that anyone who enters Cleveland must get silly and say Helllllooooooo, Cleveland but she wasn't buying it. Truth be told, I think Alexandra, at six, is at the age where she doesn't do anything that her father tells her to anymore. But I did it and it felt good to walk in the footsteps of Spinal Tap.

Cleveland is a beautiful city. I sheepishly admit to never really spending any time there and that's a shame. The Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument has the beauty and gravitas that any public memorial should. You can't help but stare at it from blocks away, with it oozing that Paris-by-way-of-Heartland look. As we continued exploring, there were so many other examples of classic turn-of-the-century big city architecture that I thought I was in Chicago. Except for one thing: people.

Shaker Square aside, there were parts of Cleveland that resembled a scene from a sci-fi movie, one of those about a city after some virus had swept through. Now, to be fair, the Indians were playing, nor were the Cavaliers, all days and nights when downtown must be rocking. But not this day. As we wondered around the city, we noticed that there didn't seem to be a lot of downtown dwelling spaces--apartment buildings, homes, placed where people, well, live. As is typical with a lot of cities, those people wandered away decades and decades ago and only now are municipalities trying desperately to lure them back.

It didn't matter really. The Berkshire bacon married with nectarines at Lola, home to Iron Chef Michael Symon, was one of the best dishes I've ever tasted in my life. Period. And the Springsteen exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a très guilty pleasure for a fan like me. (There's a spiral staircase leading from one floor of the exhibit to the next, and all the way up the words to Thunder Road are scrawled on the wall. You just sing to yourself as you climb the stairs. Way cool.)

Once you're out of Cleveland, the corn sets in pretty quick. And by the time we got to State Route 281 we were totally immersed. Flat, flat, flat. Straight, straight, straight. I was tempted to start speeding a bit, being so far away from any population center, but then I figured that the Ohio State Police probably love city slickers like me. And so I just took in the corn.

And then, Defiance. What's in a name? Well, in the case of Defiance, obviously a lot. Some towns have wimpy names like Hicksville and Plainview--both within three miles of where I grew up. Hicksville? Plainview? You might as well admit you're a total zero. But Defiance? Now that's a name with some teeth. Images of Davy Crockett (yeah, wrong state, I know) and the Alamo (yeah, wrong state, I know) instantly pop into your head.

As you enter Defiance, at least from the route we took, you can't help but notice the huge General Motors Powertrain assembly plant, recently spared in the spate of closings. It's massive and it's also painfully obvious that any closure or reduction there would devastate the city. We all hope for the best.

We stayed at the Frank Baker Inn, a bed and breakfast in a 1910 Defiance home. The inn is just a couple of feet from Defiance High School, where our Ashley was recently inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame. (The Los Angeles Dodgers' Chad Billingsley was among the other inductees.) Ashley played basketball and ran track, though everyone, including the reverend who married her, mostly spoke about her volleyball prowess. Our Ashley was District Player of the Year, so I guess I'm not going to challenge her to any pickup games anytime soon.

We had a wonderful time driving past the places that have a lot of meaning to Ashley--the site where Fort Defiance once stood ("the canons there now are only reproductions," Ashley lamented), the Crescent-News where she once worked, and the Tim Hortons doughnut shop, where, based upon Ashley's thin frame, she never once ate. And on her suggestion, we spent a morning at Sauder Village, a pioneer reenactment town not all that different from the Old Bethpage Village Restoration I used to sneak into as a kid. Alexandra helped churn the butter at Sauder and my own memories of doing the same thing--decades and miles apart--came flooding back.

The best part of the trip was meeting Aashley's family, particularly her parents and grandparents, of whom we've heard so much. Everyone was so welcoming, just as we expected. In fact, perhaps the highlight of the trip came moments after we arrived at Ashley's house. I had teased her about a welcome parade, complete with bunting, but Ashley secured the next best thing: an official proclamation from the mayor of Defiance, raised seal and all, welcoming us to his fair city. ("Whereas Defiance is home to six-time national horseshoes champion Alan Francis...")

The whole weekend was an absolute treat. After all, most people in America don't get married at the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. As much as I love that venue, there's so much to be said for a small Ohio wedding. Eating breakfast at Kissner's, where we were the only people who didn't know everyone else in the joint; watching my daughter Alexandra dance the night away with a charming young boy named Michael; and, most of all, watching Ashely, International Ambassador of Defiance, Ohio prove my favorite author wrong.

You can, and should, go home again.

Take care,

Matt