Day Three: Indiana
We survived our night in Indiana, and after an underwhelming free hotel breakfast we were off to Indiana Dunes National Park. Indiana Dunes is part state park/part national park with a huge steel mill in the middle. The wind and weather were pretty severe, so no there was no swimming allowed on the beaches. Indiana Dunes is basically a long beach on Lake Michigan. Technically it has hiking trails, but not really in the traditional walk through the woods sense because it’s all sandy and beachy. We ended up taking off our Tevas and walking along the beach for a few miles and that scratched our activity itch for the day.
A scary side story (trigger warning: sinkholes) Oddly enough, we heard a story on the podcast My Favorite Murder in the car after visiting the park about a little boy who fell in a sinkhole on one of the dunes. He sunk right in feet first and was stuck in the sinkhole for four hours! The rescue team had to carefully bulldoze and then hand shovel small batches of the dune so they didn’t accidentally crush the boy when trying to dig him out. He was unconscious when they finally found him. They realized he was alive when his head started bleeding (one of the rescue workers accidentally nicked him with a shovel during the dig). When he came to he had no memory of the whole incident and only had the cut on his head to show for the whole ordeal. Fortunately, neither Ian or I had any sinkhole incidents on the dunes today.
After getting sufficiently sandy, we headed back to the hotel to gather our things, check out, and hit the road. Ian says the roads were stressing him out, so it wasn’t the most fun driving day. Pot holes in the interstate are not ideal, especially when you’re towing. Our hotel for that night was right outside of St. Louis (metropolitan areas are not your friend when you’re towing either). Despite being located right behind a TGI Fridays, we decided to branch out and drive five minutes down the road to get some local Mexican fare, highly rated on Google reviews so it must’ve been good, right? Yes, yes it was. We got chicken and veggie fajitas and they were worth the ten minutes round trip in the car.
Our small victory today was not getting trapped in a sinkhole. Hopefully Gateway Arch will bring more exciting stories for tomorrow!
