07/11/2026
Always 🫣🤪
Ohio will hand you the single best sunset of the entire month, and it will do it directly over the cart corral at Kroger, no reservation required and absolutely no explanation offered.
Drive out to Hocking Hills at golden hour, camera ready, expecting the postcard shot everyone's seen on Instagram, and the sky just goes flat gray, maybe one halfhearted orange streak if the clouds feel generous. Meanwhile forty minutes later, pulling into Kroger for milk and a rotisserie chicken, the entire western sky catches fire, pink and orange stretched clean across the parking lot like it's been saving up all week specifically for this exact moment.
Nobody else even looks up. A guy loading a cart full of pop and lunch meat into a Silverado doesn't notice he's standing in front of the best view in three counties. Someone wrangling a shopping cart with a busted wheel walks straight through what should be a calendar photo without blinking twice. One person stops, phone out, snapping a picture that'll get zero context and thirty two likes captioned "just Ohio things."
It never happens at Hocking Hills. It never happens along the Cuyahoga Valley overlooks. It happens over a strip mall, next to a Great Clips and a Marco's Pizza, silhouetting a row of shopping carts like it's auditioning for National Geographic.
Ohio doesn't waste its best work on scenery that's trying. It saves it for a Tuesday grocery run, no audience prepared, no photographer ready, just pure chaotic beauty over a Kroger parking lot that closes in twenty minutes.
