An Indy-500 Things to Do Week

Given the week’s rainy start, I’ve decided to bag a whole lot of touring and turn my week in Indianapolis into some sightseeing plus everyday living. Did some shopping at Camping World and Home Depot for a small side table and an air compressor and other goodies for the rig. A Goodwill drop off (still downsizing) and a couple of trips to the post office (still trying to get my trailer registration completed—one snafu after another). Got a delicious blueberry fritter from a local bakery in Greenfield, and am sorry now that I didn’t get two. Took a couple of short drives to Rushville, some antique stores, and a stop at a little place called Knightstown for a look at a still working local railroad. Mostly reading and puttering and sitting outside with Patchouli in my off time.

A few impressions on my drives through Indiana country: A folded-up, white-haired lady in her 70s steering a riding mower down the grassy median strip past Knightstown. “Nameless Creek” on highway 40. Highway 40 itself, an historic national road, proclaimed as the “Highway That Built a Nation.” Corn fields. Expansive lawns everywhere, with very few fences around houses or yards. “Barnyard Sale” signs instead of “Garage Sale” signs. Corn fields. A pair of longhorn steer horns set as a hood ornament on a red convertible Cadillac, as wide as the car hood and as pointy as the fins at the back. And did I mention corn fields?

Rushville business was half alive...

...and half deceased.

Former Rushville merchant art.

In the back streets of Knightstown, the Carthage Knightstown Shirley RR still chugs tourists about four times a week along the 5-mile Big Four Route...

...which currently runs straight through people’s backyards.

“That’s my first wife,” conductor Tom Allison joked in his tiny railroad museum. “I liked her so much that I had her stuffed.”

Wednesday was the busiest of the week. When in Indy, you do the Indy, so I wove my way through town to find the Indy 500 Speedway. The tour there includes a bus jaunt on the actual racetrack, which provides a unique first-hand look at what those racers zip around at 200+mph. The driver said that during the same time we did a single lap, the racer would have done almost thirteen. Yikes. The rest of the museum is a fascinating collection of race cars and other vehicles. I, of course, was most enthralled with the older ones, and the tune of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” couldn’t help but play in my head the whole time.

On the speedway.

Yes, that’s a golf course in the middle of the oval.

I should have blurred this picture of the grandstand for a more realistic view.

All that’s left of the original "Brickyard" track (it used to be all brick) is at the start/finish line. Improving and smoothing the road was a major factor of increased lap times.

Annual Indy 500 winners are immortalized on this revolving silver trophy.

I found the images a little disturbing, though, like something out of Dante’s Inferno.

The Wasp, winner of the first 500 mile race, 1911, average speed 74.59 mph. Ray Harroun drove it without a second man (mechanic) on board, and other racers were so worried that he wouldn’t see cars coming behind him that he installed a rear-view mirror...purportedly the first one on any automobile.

Hood latch on the Wasp.

A more contemporary racing (and marketing) vehicle.

1912 second place winner...a Fiat. Chain drive, canvas covered wooden flooring, plush leather seats.

1909 Haynes, built in Indiana.

When you travel alone, you get self-portraits wherever you can. :)

Daimler and Benz were both patenting motorized vehicles in 1886, the beginning of the horseless carriage era. This is the Benz version.

One cool roadster, 1914.

Holy moly, crafted wooden spokes.

Tired of oily smelling cars, I headed for a brief visit to the Indianapolis Museum of Art gardens (fabulous) and the onsite Lilly House (as in Lilly Pharmaceuticals fame).

“Memory Cloud” in the lobby of the art museum. These are little plastic 35mm slide viewers, each with an image from the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s that the artist picked up at flea markets and antique stores. Visitors are invited to peek into the Christmases, proms, and new-car purchase days of other people’s past.

The famous LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana is under restoration in the gardens.

Lilly House, renovated to the 1930s, when the Lillys lived here.

View into their backyard. The gardens were one big nothing when they started. A canal runs along the ravine below. Too many mosquitoes that day to make hanging around the woods very pleasant.

Five hours on my feet, and I was ready for another yummy dinner with Dean. This time we walked to his favorite pizza joint, Jocko’s Pizza, for a half all-meat, half chicken-with-basil, thin crust pizza that was so big that we each had a meal of leftovers to take home. And oh, so good—I’d definitely do this place again. We split three local (Indiana and Wisconsin) beers and walked home under a bright fat moon. The trees were still down all over his neighborhood from Tuesday’s storm. More wine and talk at his place, until 1:00a again. For a couple of usually homebound hermits, we sure can do a lot of visiting!

Rain Rain, Here to Stay

Man, oh, man—this is what being fluid about travel plans is all about.

With so many things to do in the area, all plans for the day are put on hold, especially my first choice of a hike in Brown County State Park 50 miles south. Thunderstorms are predicted all day, and rain has been dumping for the past hour.

My ten-year-old backup laptop PC died this morning. Already on life support with a flaky hard drive and a decrepit battery, its demise was sealed by a minor spike during the beginnings of an electrical storm. The Mac survived the same, but for now it’s on battery only.

All this rain makes for some pretty soft dead bugs on the rig, so during a lull in the lightning, I don my Chaco sandals (maybe I need hip boots), grab my extendable broom, and scrub the worst of the crud from the front of the Flying Heart. It’s the first time I’ve been able to get to it because most RV campgrounds don’t allow rig-washing onsite.

The rain is easy to be out in—almost warm in the Indiana summer, but very, very wet because the raindrops are so dang big. The shell of my raincoat is soaked after only five minutes, and my rolled up jeans hang heavy with water. The lightning starts to come back, and I abandon my metal lightning-rod broom and head back inside.

The campground roads near me are starting to flood. Smaller cars are up to their hubcaps as they drive by, and the truck’s passenger-side tires are in almost two inches of puddle…as is my front yard. The right side of the trailer is in a low spot and propped on over two inches of boards to level the rig; the plywood is swelling.

For now the best I can do is hunker down with some hot tea and do stuff around the rig. This consists mostly of grousing at the delay in my plans and getting rid of papers that seem to accumulate when I’m not watching.


The second hour of rain has me calling the front desk.

“Hi, this is Audrey, site 203. I’m surrounded by a lot of water here. Should I be worried about flooding? Maybe I should move to another site?”

“No problem, honey. It’ll be fine. There’s a sump pump right next to your trailer. The water will drain away once the rain stops.”

OK. So when is it gonna stop?

Another half inch creeps up the tires and barbecue ring, and I need somebody to talk to. I call Tom and Mimi, experienced RVrs and my support line in times like this. I am glad for the moral support, especially as they relate stories of being rained out or needing to wait out weather on their own trips. Go with the flow, Audrey. Go with the flow.

After four hours, the pelting rain finally stops and my little home and truck are the sole occupants of their own lake.

I slosh out again. The capped sewer pipe is under shin-deep water (good thing I hadn’t hooked up yet). On the other side, the level is over my ankles. My 9x12 woven vinyl patio mat is floating and muddy, blessedly anchored by a water-logged wooden picnic table. The foot-tall barbecue ring is half submerged, with bits of wood bobbing in the middle. I can just make out tiny bubbles rising near the picnic table…the sump pump doing its thing, I hope.

The pond extends over several sites. (My sympathy goes out to the fellow in a tent.) Nearby, people send rooster tails from their cars as they squish through the roads. I once again grab the cleaning brush and give both the truck and the rig a thorough scrubbing with the water in my lake.




That evening I talk to Dean and find out that the city and south counties had been hit hard…seven inches in the south and Brown County (good thing I skipped the hike), four inches in the city, with lots of power outages from lightning.

Dean’s neighborhood suffered quite a bit—trees and branches crashing into parked cars, a transformer across the street catching fire, several blocks nearby out of power for the next four days. Dean was at work for the worst of it, and thankfully neither his home nor his trees suffered any damage, although his next door neighbor’s car is now tarped and taped because of a falling branch.

You Look Familiar…

OK, first a fussy moment. I am staying just 15 miles outside of Indianapolis (no small town, this), am a mere half mile north of I-70, and in the middle of a geologically flat state—and I’m practically communications starved. No NPR radio station is accessible from my site, I have no TV by choice, and the RV park’s Internet service (Cisco) doesn’t support Macintosh, so I have no local email or Internet except 15 minutes at a time on a prehistoric dial-up at the office a quarter mile away (bring your own computer). Even my backup laptop, a Windows unit, can’t seem to hook into their Cisco web page from this spot. At least I’ve got a good cell phone signal and a weather radio, so I’m not completely incommunicado. [End of fussy moment.]

Last night I pulled in a few hours later than usual—about 5:30p because of the several rest stops I made along the way. And, I realized this morning, it was actually 6:30p because I had unknowingly crossed into the Eastern time zone.

Despite the latish hour (and the next day being a workday), my Indianapolis friend, Dean, was more than willing to have me drop in for a visit the same night I arrived. He lives in a beautiful older neighborhood in eastern Indianapolis, where the streets are narrow and winding, the trees are tall and broad, and a lot of the houses are brick and cottage-like, with what seems to be one long shared lawn all along the road frontage.

It was good to see a familiar face for the first time in weeks…well, actually, for the first time in 15 or so years, if you count how long it’s been since I’ve been here and seen Dean. He and I were colleagues at HBJ publishing in San Diego: I edited college textbooks and he designed their covers and insides.

Besides being a great graphic designer, Dean happens to be a really good cook, which is why I opted to eat at his place instead of having dinner out. He treated me to his specialty of hickory smoked catfish, full of spicy Cajon heat and grilled in his backyard under a twilight sky to the sound of cicadas and crickets. He accompanied it with fresh corn on the cob (local, of course), red potatoes, and stuffed home grown tomatoes (huge, juicy, as flavorful as only home grown can be)—all also grilled over coals and seasoned with his own garden herbs like rosemary and chives.

We sat until well after midnight at his dining table, chatting through the years over cheap white wine and hot Julian peach-apple pie (which I had imported across country for just such an occasion). He sent me home with a bag of fresh tomatoes and squash from his overflowing garden, promising more (“Take all you want, please!”) in the days to come. I am more looking forward to visiting with him for another evening, as his schedule can allow, and we’ve made plans to go to the Indiana State Fair on Saturday.

This is my longest stop yet on the trip—a full week in one spot—and I’m taking advantage of the breathing space. Today (Monday) I hung around the rig and laid plans for the rest of the week. There’s lots to do in Indianapolis and environs, depending on how far I want to drive to get someplace.

And because I’m parked a while, I finally brought out my wonderful peregrine whirligig that Janis gave me before I left San Diego. It looks quite spiffy out there, spinning in the wind. Patchouli seems to like it, too.

Starved Rock

Although the adult home of the famed Lincoln, Illinois is a pass-through state this time around for me. I’m in one of those ho-hum funks that sometimes happen when I travel, and my curiosity and tourist energy are low. What better place to want nothing to do than Utica, Illinois.

My mood means Utica itself is uninspiring. A wandering drive to its heart—the 1830s “Village”—brings me to the smallest town yet that still gets a mark for having old buildings and an RV park within its county boundaries (several miles from this quaint locale). The core town is about as wide as it is long (one block), with a couple of antique stores, a Cheatin’ Gourmet food shop (“dips, oils, wine, gifts”), a wine store, a LaSalle County Historical Museum. Unless you’re really into local history, old town Utica is one of those “blink and you miss it” kind of places, deceptively small until you realize that the city’s contemporary boundaries sprawl along a lot of county roads, farmland, an 1800s canal, and I-80.

This scene popped into view right before I turned left to reach the old village of Utica. I just loved the juxtaposition of new stainless steel and old brick steeple. This church is one of the reminders of the French presence in the area: founded by Father Jacques Marquette, who explored (and claimed) the area for France with Louis Jolliet in 1673.

What Rapunzel’s Tower might have looked like in steel...

Utica calls itself the “Illinois Village for All Seasons,” which means its primary draw is the great outdoors. State parks abound, and the area offers golfing, water sports, an indoor amusement park. My spirit needs a walk in the woods, so I head out to Starved Rock State Park, on the Illinois River. The day is misty and rainy.

I like this park. Miles of trails climb through woods and up and over sandstone and rock formations. Numerous “Away” and “Return” tags help me stay on track as trails cross each other. Lots of birds and water and yellow flowers.

The river here is basically a canyon gorge, and it’s the site of one of the many locks and dams that take ships to the Mississippi River. It’s called Starved Rock because of a Native American legend in which some Illiniwek Indians killed an Ottowa Indian chief, and then fled to the top of a bluff during subsequent retaliatory raids. The Ottowa and their allies surrounded the bluff, and the Illiniwek, trapped on top, eventually died of starvation. (War Tip No. 1: Good viewpoints don’t always make good retreat spots.)

The Illinois River.

A double-length barge. This will take over an hour to get through the lock on the north side of the river (below).

Lover’s Leap seen from Starved Rock.

And Starved Rock seen from Lover’s Leap.

A romantic, if somewhat disturbing, visual image. I also hope dear Gabi learns about contractions someday.

This tree was still thriving, despite its mostly roots-up lifestyle.

Loved this tree on a rock column.

A bunch of feet-dragging 12-year-old boys, all dressed in red T-shirts saying “Troop 007 Normal Illinois,” caught up to me around this spot on the trail. One of them sniggered to his friends, “I’d like that kind of wood.” Other boys also tittered as they passed the sign, and the scout leader said dryly, “It’s not that funny, boys.”