By Ken Drenten

2025 is nearly here! I am completing my first full year with Dusty Tires after launching the website and blog in March 2023. Dusty Tires is about all the wonderful and unusual places to visit in my home state of Ohio (and close to Ohio), and it also exists to support small to medium sized businesses.

In 2024, the site’s blog had approximately 5,400 views and 3,400 visits from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, China, India, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Philippines and Portugal.

The site grew to 138 subscribers as well. Reminder: subscription is free and you will not be spammed with advertisements. This is a pastime for me and I do it for fun.

I have posted information about hundreds of places on 66 pages in Dusty Tires, and I continually add more. Pages added in 2024 were about winter recreation activities; glass blowing studios; pottery and other arts & crafts shops; gem shops and mineral mining locations; neon and vintage signs; community theatre groups; videos; parks and gardens; canoeing and kayaking; bicycle rail-trails; public beaches; caves and other unique natural areas; and unique places/unusual museums.

In 2024, the most popular page in terms of views (after the Home page) was “Vintage Stereo & Radio Sales and Repair.” I will look into doing more on this topic in the future. For 2025, I’m planning to add more pages, so keep watching. If you have any suggestions for new page or blog topics, let me know.

I do read requests to add new places. In response to readers’ suggestions I’ve recently added information about Caldwell, Ohio’s holiday attractions and Jolly Pirate Donuts.

In 2024 I created 81 posts about a wide variety of places. The most popular blog post, with 344 views, was about Rax Restaurants, posted Dec. 12. December was the month with the most views and visits last year, with 742 views and 648 visitors.

If you have been keeping track, I have now published blog posts of nearly all the Ohio mills included in my book “Waterwheelin,” published a few years ago. I’ll finish up the last few in January. I typically post one blog item per week, and twice a week from summer through the holiday season.

Actually, it was the idea to republish my book about mills that led to Dusty Tires in 2022. After I learned that printing costs had more than doubled since the last printing in 2016, I opted not to reprint the book, but to look into posting updated material online. I also created a blog archive this past year to make it easier to look up past articles.

I maintain a Dusty Tires Facebook page, where links to all the Dusty Tires posts are located. I share blog posts on Facebook with a number of interested groups, as well as to friends and followers of both the Dusty Tires page and my personal Facebook page. The Rax Restaurant post was the top Facebook post in 2024, with more than 15,000 views and 2,000 interactions.

People ask me if I travel to each of the places I write about in “real time,” or just before each post is published. The answer is no – most of these places I visited as recently as a year or so ago and some visits go back a number of years. I have an extensive library of photos from these visits. I check websites and other sources to add and confirm information, and I’m always looking for new ideas and topics to write about.

I work about six weeks ahead of time to post blog material. As I began drafting this article in early December, for example, I had all my blog posts for January completed and scheduled. As each posting date nears, I check and edit each blog post prior to final release.

Since the year has passed, a number of places listed in Dusty Tires have closed their doors, including Dan’s Diner and Little Palace Restaurant in Columbus, Paul’s Fifth Avenue Restaurant in Grandview Heights and Streb’s General Store in Berlin.

I continue to find that Ohio really does have an amazing variety of places and activities to offer for those who take the time to find out what’s available. If you have ideas for places and areas you’d like me to delve into, please send me a comment.

Happy New Year in 2025 and I’ll be continuing to write more about ways to get your tires dusty (and snowy) in the Buckeye state!

Ken Drenten is creator and editor of Dusty-Tires.com, a travel blog for out-of-the-ordinary places in Ohio.

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