Ride the Ducks

We have wanted to check out Ride the Ducks for a while - in fact, we even tried to do it when we were just visiting Cincinnati a couple years ago. Every time we had looked into it, it had worked out that it had followed a recent heavy rainfall so the water level of the Ohio River was too high.  We are running out of summer and we kept forgetting about this tour and doing other things with our weekend; we decided last weekend that now was the time to make this happen.

We started the day with some delicious vegan fare from Park + Vine. They are one of the few places in town where you can find vegetarian goetta. If you've never heard of goetta, then from what I gather, you're probably not from Cincinnati. ;-) I hadn't heard of it until I moved here either, and then I discovered that there is a whole festival dedicated to it. Goetta (pronounced 'get'-ta) is a German-American breakfast sausage popular around Greater Cincinnati. It is thought to have originated from German settlers in the area. 

After lunch, we headed over to Kentucky to purchase our tickets for Ride the Ducks in Newport. I love visiting Newport on the Levee; there are so many restaurants and it is such a quaint area to walk around - and it's where I visited my first Tom + Chee! 

We had about an hour to kill before our reserved time slot on the duck bus/boat, so we grabbed a coffee drink from Saxby's and walked around some. OMG, the specialty coffee drink list at Saxby's is amazing. I just had a Caramel Macchiato Frolatte, but there are so many more flavors I want to try! You can check out the listing here - if you are a creamy coffee drink lover like me, I'm sure you will be impressed!

First things first, they pass out your 'Wacky Quacker' - the volume can only be adjusted from loud to really loud, LOL, but that's all part of the fun. 

 With everyone loaded up...

we headed over to the bridge to cross over the Ohio River back into Cincinnati.

We drove up to the boat ramp to enter the river.

During the tour, you spend about 25 minutes in the water and the rest of your time is on land.  

There was a Reds game going on as we rode past the Great American Ball Park - we had hoped to get to a game, but we've pretty much ran out of season. I guess there's always next year! 

We passed under the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was built in 1866. 

Taking this tour by land and water definitely provided us with some unique perspectives - we've been by the Ohio River plenty of times, but this was our first time on it. We learned new things about the city, and I only wish we'd made it out to do this sooner!