Finding the Blaine Hill Bridge on the original National Road was an early major accomplishment for the Dusty Tires YouTube channel experience. (Credit: Ken Drenten)

By Ken Drenten

2026 is here and the second full year of Dusty Tires is complete after the website and blog launched in March 2023.

Dusty Tires is about all the wonderful, historical and unusual places to visit in my home state of Ohio (and close to Ohio). It also exists to support small to medium sized businesses, communities and organizations.

The site experienced considerable growth in 2025. The blog had 6,999 views (5,400 in 2024) and 5,459 visitors (3,400 in 2024). In all there were 114 blog posts published during the year. Overall, since the blog first began, there have been approximately 17,000 views and 10,500 visitors.

During the year, the site grew to 162 subscribers. Reminder: subscription is free and you will not be spammed with advertisements. This is a pastime for me and I do it for enjoyment.

I have posted information about hundreds of places on some 70 pages in Dusty Tires, and I continually add more. Pages added in 2025 were about Carousels & Merry Go Rounds, Summer Recreation and Camps, Children’s Museums and one of two major new ventures begun last year, Dusty’s Short Stories.

Dusty’s Short Stories is a collection of fiction I’ve written that includes short stories, some poems and a novella, The Jacktown Trail. I’m working on more content for this section as I go along, but it may become more sporadic as I have published most of the content I’ve already written. The section is illustrated by my original artwork based on drawings I had done years ago as a teenager and young adult, and recently colorized by computer.

The second major new venture, which started in July, is the Dusty Tires YouTube channel, where viewers can find more than 40 full-length and short videos. This is a learning experience for me, and I am gradually improving as I go along. So far the channel has received more than 12,000 views. The top video in terms of views was a short video on the Mount Vernon Dog Fountain with 1,270 views. Several others received around 1,000 views.

I have always wanted to make photo/video records of favorite roads and destinations in Ohio. Now small mountable video cameras and YouTube make that relatively easy. I’ve traveled the entire extent of U.S. 40 in Ohio and have taken jaunts around other areas since starting the series that I call “Travel Ohio with Dusty Tires.”

It’s been fun and a challenge to learn some new skills like planning stories that lend themselves to video, video editing and on-camera speaking. At the age of 66, I guess I can still learn some new skills.

Since July, I have been posting three stories each week plus a video. Generally, an Ohio travel feature posts each Tuesday; fiction posts on Wednesday, and a Travel Ohio with Dusty Tires video on YouTube and its accompanying blog post is on Thursday. That pace usually slows down in winter due to weather-related travel issues.

The most popular 2025 blog post, with 196 views, was about the 100th anniversary of the crash of the U.S.S. Shenandoah, posted Sept. 2, 2025. August had the most views and visits last year, with 801 views and 622 visitors; December was close behind with 793 views and 612 visitors.

I have now completed blog posts of all the Ohio mills included in my out-of-print 2016 book “Waterwheelin.” Readers can find these, and all the blog articles that have been published, in a blog archive page.

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.

I continue to find that Ohio (and parts of nearby states) 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 2026 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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All rights reserved, Dusty Tires (dusty-tires.com), 2026.