Twelve Maple Crest residents recently took the short country drive to Columbus Grove, along with Debbie Mohr, the Maple Crest activities coordinator and Ana Carnauba, a summer assistant from Rhodes State College to visit a museum.

That sounds like an ordinary sort of outing, but as the visitors slipped through the back door of the old brick building, they were transported into the Savannah of Africa!

An enormously tall giraffe seemed to lope towards the onlookers from the African grass, and so the adventure began. This was no ordinary museum, but rather an extraordinary "natural-looking" display of trophy "big game," mostly from the world-wide hunting and fishing expeditions of twin brothers, Gary and Larry Clymer.

The brothers' friendly personalities and unique real-life stories added a feeling of "being around the camp fire" to the experience, and sparked the desire to go to (or to return to) Africa, too.

Maple Crest's Dick Evans has his own hunting stories and trophies, but, if that kind of Safari is not possible, Clymer's' Museum is the next best thing.

Then the next day, the Maple Crest residents were treated to a special violin concert - a "replay," so to speak, from four years earlier.

When Rosalie Dosh joined the Maple Crest community, in 2007, she encouraged her granddaughters to perform at Maple Crest.

At that time, Kira Benson was 9 years old and her sister, Jorie, was 6 years old. Imagine the amazement of the Maple Crest residents when these young girls played their violins with skill and passion.

Now, four years later, the improvement is incredible. Kira and Jorie started violin lessons with the Suzuki method, a listening technique, when they were 3 years old and 2 1/2 years old, respectively.

Kira prefers, at this point, to focus on classical music and Jorie has added fiddling to her repertoire. Their mother, Amy Benson, accompanies the girls at times on the piano, and also on the violin, which she picked up when Kira began taking violin lessons.

A surprise at the concert this year was having the girls' cousin, Tad Steiner (son of lead maintenance man at Maple Crest, T.R. Steiner), join in a quartet with his viola. It wouldn't be a surprise to the Maple Crest community if someday the foursome appeared on "America's Got Talent!"