From Cincinnati, US-50 follows surface streets through the warehouse and residential districts along the Ohio River, before becoming a freeway for the quick drive east to Mariemont (pop. 3,408). Built in the mid-1920s as one of the nation’s first planned “Garden City” communities, Mariemont’s mock-Tudor downtown centers around the historic and very comfortable Best Western Mariemont Inn ($80; 513/271-2100), right on US-50 at 6880 Wooster Pike. Across the street there’s a branch of the excellent local ice-cream chain, Graeter’s, and the sole surviving neighborhood of Mariemont’s original 1920s half-timbered arts-and-crafts homes is an easily walkable block to the southeast.
East of Mariemont, US-50 crosses the Little Miami River at the scenic, 25-mph town of Milford—where there’s a Frisch’s Big Boy (513/831-0111) restaurant at 840 Lila Avenue with a great old “Big Boy” sign, straight out of American Graffiti—before racing east across 40 miles of flat and sparsely settled farming country to Hillsboro.
