R and J in the USA

After the important task of finding some boba tea and a massage chair after her first full day in the state capital, Julie split up her two days in Indianapolis with an overnight in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The next day, she returned to Indianapolis to take in yet another stunning state capitol. She had a tour all to herself. Actually, she was outnumbered by tour guides 2:1. There was the regular tour guide and, also, a sincere young college student learning the ropes that took over the tour for one room in the house chambers. After finishing his spiel, he both modestly and proudly revealed that this had been his very first act as an official statehouse tour guide. He did a great job and Julie was delighted to get to be his first audience. She learned a great deal about the building, the state, and life in Indiana throughout the tour.

While she enjoyed a beautiful country drive leaving Indianapolis en route to a little town called Peru, her funhouse GPS got her on the wrong road going north, rendering the directions from her Harvest Host useless. She got on the phone with the host, who was kind enough to direct her into the town of Peru where she said she’d meet Julie and escort her back into her own little personal campground on a river. It was as peaceful a night as any, as long as Julie didn’t leave the doors open and let the bugs in.

She was looking forward to what the next day would bring as she headed up to South Bend’s airport where she would collect precious cargo. Julie was more than a little excited to see Ryan. Though she had enjoyed her time solo, seeing his face never seems to dim in excitement and anticipation. Ryan met Julie with an equal enthusiasm and it was back to the good old days of 24/7-hood.

After a visit to the campus of the famed home of the Fighting Irish, we made our way to Indiana Dunes National Park and were more than happy to find out from the Ranger that, indeed, boondocking in the visitor’s center parking lot was more than welcome. We took a ranger-led hike to the top of one of the dunes, where we could see the city of Chicago in the distant horizon just up and around the tip of the Great Lake Michigan.

On our way back to the visitor’s center we found a spot along the lake to open the back of the van, take in the Lake Michigan sunset, and enjoy one of the best parts of van life.

We fell asleep to a beautiful garden of wildflowers behind us and a stunning sunset in front of us.

In the morning we made our way to a town that sat amongst the dunes, Gary, where we would run our Indiana 5K. You can read about it in our 5K section.

Right away, we noticed that Gary was in rough shape compared to its heyday decades earlier, when it was at the center of American steel production. We learned that its population has decreased by 61% since then. The town still wore the marks of a place that had a “used to be” story. Still, the park where the race was, on the shores of Lake Michigan, was beautiful.

We had a lovely conversation with a young woman who was born and raised in Gary, and returned there for medical school. She told us that, once you get past some of the run-down nature of parts of the city, the beauty of the place made it one worth returning to. This conversation reminded us of something we’d run into in just about every state we’ve visited. So often, no matter what someone likes or doesn’t like about the place they grew up in, there is something that happens after going out into the world. People get an appreciation of that place from the outside in, and find themselves longing for something that is about their own personal relationship to that place – that it’s home. This was the third time we’d run into this in Indiana specifically and is one of the reasons that “home is where the heart is” became the hook she used when writing her Indiana song.

We left Indiana sobered by parts of its history, inspired by its beauty, and, especially for Julie, connected to a certain feeling of home that was captured, somehow, throughout the state. A feeling that the people who were here found something special in it because it was home. Of course, that is true everywhere. But there was a particular Indiana vibe that Julie felt and found to have a sense of home, even just while passing through.