Southeast Tour 06/2010

Day 1, Thursday 6/17/2010

And the journey starts in the driveway... and she's already starting with the faces... that was my goal for the trip, to take a photo of her where she's NOT making a face... 

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Indiana is pretty boring for the most part.  And it didn't take long before it became clear that my daughter was going to be spending some large percentage of her trip sleeping.  I seriously considered turning around.  On the rest stops I would ask her if she was sleeping and she'd deny it.  The good thing is she wasn't going anywhere; trunk was behind her, I was in front of her, and basically her legs were around the tank bags.  She really had no place to go, and on we went.

This was the exciting scenery in Indiana... wind farms... miles and miles of fields with huge windmills across them...

Well.. at least she was awake in that photo...

We did manage to see a couple interesting things as we got closer to Hoosiers National Forest; an Elk farm and a Shetland Pony farm...  The roads through there were actually pretty nice... curving through the countryside and forested areas. Of course, that was after 200+ miles of BOOOORING!

I was told those are day lilies.  They were everywhere along the road.  I thought is was Indiana's state flower until I saw them later in other states.  They must be benefiical for drainage and holding the soil together or something like that.

Took the photo below in the parking lot of a McDonalds about noon.  Yeah, now she's all bright eyed.  Yeah, we definitely stopped at McDonald's a few times... got some coupons from my connections.

Well, when the excitement was over we landed by the Celina Lake campgrounds, at least I think that's where we were.  As you head south on 37 from St. Croix there are two Forest Preserve signs, we turned at the second one, which had a sand beach for swimming.  Yes, I had managed to talk the daughter into camping at least one night to see how she liked it...

I was hot and humid, so right after setting up camp we headed for the beach.  It was actually a pretty decent.  There was a large sand beach, the water was kind of warm, but there was the occasional cold pocket as we moved around. It felt really good after a whole day of riding in the heat. These are shots looking toward the beach from the parking lot.

As I was swimming, my daughter pointed out that a fly had landed on my head. So, I just dunked under water, but when I came back up, it landed again. And most of the time there I was playing games with this stupid fly that wouldn't leave me alone.  Daughter and I tried teaming up to kill it, but then it started chasing her. Apparently it like the deeper end of the lake so she retreated to the shallower area leaving me to do battle.

Wasn't long before daughters stomach started grumbling and we headed back to make our way into town and get some food.

By the way, this is the proper attire to wear while riding to the beach from the campsite... T-shirt, swimming trunks and road race boots...  I don't normally ride without full gear, but the beach was over a mile from the campsite, which we weren't going to walk, cause you broke into a sweat just thinking about moving.  The only other shoes I brought was some sandals, and I can't really work the controls in those... so boots it was...

The campsite was actually pretty nice... big, clean, with a nice fire pit... Turned out that the nearest town with food was over 20 miles away.. so we got geared back up and took off... In the first photo below she's clearly saying, "I don't want my face to be seen after that trunks and road race boots photo... I don't know who you are. You're embarrassing me."

Dinner consisted of a choice between some really cheesy looking pizza place (HAH! "Cheesy" pizza place... ) and Wendy's, we opted for some salads at Wendy's.

After getting back I built a small fire just from sticks and stuff lying around the forest, for a little fire meditation before going to sleep.