Moving On

Wow, three nights in one location.  Hard to believe.  Next thing you know we will be sitting around a campfire...

Nah. Around here, the mosquitoes would have a heyday.  Besides, we don’t have room to carry firewood and we’re too cheap to buy the wet stuff that the campgrounds typically offer.

Abigail had a remote staff meeting she had to attend for her work so she had to get up at 7:30.  She got up on time but it wasn’t pretty.  For much of the call, she lay on her bed with her eyes closed, looking like she was asleep, while the slides from her meeting were displayed on her phone, which was perched right against the cell phone signal booster in a desperate attempt to maintain a connection.  I don’t think she saw any of them.  But she was registered as present at the meeting and she told us later on that she was, in fact, listening.  I’m not so sure how much she retained.

I remember those days, having to show up at a remote meeting or handle some work task while on vacation.  I tried to minimize them but that pressure was always there.  I remember those days, and I am glad they are nearly five years in the past.

When Abigail’s meeting ended at 9am, we rolled out of Shades State Park towards Clifty Falls State Park, just under three hours away, according to Google Maps.  Three hours took us nearly all day.  In our typical fashion, we made several stops, and didn’t arrive here until well after dinner.

We made a quick stop at an Aldi along the way to pick up some groceries and then stopped near Taylorsville, at the Indiana Premium Outlet shopping center.  I’m not a big one for malls, especially outlet malls, but this one had a Pepper Palace store, so it became a desirable destination.  We seem to come home with barbecue sauce from distant locations on many trips and a couple varieties from the Pepper Palace are some of our favorites.  They have an extensive tasting bar, and we spent some time tasting several varieties of sauces.  Some we liked, others not so much.  In the end, we came away with four bottles of sauce, three being some of our favorites, and one being an experiment.  These bottles will be squirreled away in some overstuffed storage area as soon as Abigail leaves for home.  For now, they live in a box on the bed and get moved at night.

We stopped in Columbus, Indiana, known for its modern architecture and public art displays.  We read that the visitor center has a Chihuly exhibit so we made sure to include that in the stop.  We found out that the piece is surrounded by scaffolding for cleaning which made it a bit harder to view but it brought up something that had never occurred to me: how do they clean these intricate glass sculptures, particularly when they are composed of thousands of exquisite blown glass elements?  Deb looked it up later.  Apparently it’s a thing, and there’s people who are experts in cleaning these things.

It turns out we were parked right across the street from the Cummins headquarters, which contains a museum, of sorts, of their engine products.  Rather interesting to see, especially the exploded engine sculpture in the lobby, but the museum did not address any of the history of the company.

We walked around downtown for a bit, seeing some of the colorful sixth street, before taking off again.

Next stop was the Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge, because it was almost right on the way.  We took a short hike to Richart Lake, very scenic but we were getting hungry so we parked in the visitor center parking lot and made dinner.

Arriving at the campground here at Clifty Falls State Park, we saw immediately that the majority of campers were parked in the electric sites.  And for good reason,  It was a hot day today, will be hot again tomorrow, so the air conditioners were working overtime.

The non-electric loop, where we are, is nearly deserted.  We’re on the move most of the day so we would be unplugged anyway.  And it cools down nicely at night.

174 miles driven today.