Sunday. A day of worship. Whatever your language is. And we did just that. We were set up nicely in the parking lot of the Chinese Community Church of Indianapolis, so we didn’t have far to go. We attended their 9am service. Which was entirely in Mandarin. Abigail got most of it and leaned over to me several times to whisper what the pastor was saying. Otherwise, we understood very little. But it was good to see our great God be taught and praised in another language.
You would think that we would pick some of this up. After all, we had a Chinese couple living in our house for almost a month recently and heard the language a lot during that time. I’ve picked up a word or two that I can recognize, but otherwise these ossified brain cells of mine refuse to absorb any of this so I remain steadfastly on the outside of this language. Spanish was much easier and even shares most of the alphabet, but these Chinese glyphs on the screen make no sense at all.
After church we drove into the Broad Ripple area of Indianapolis, to the Cake Bake shop where we had lunch. We’ve been to the Carmel location of this shop several times to pick up a completely decadent piece of cake. This is the first time we have had lunch here. Unfortunately, the Carmel location was all booked up, and we learned that it is one of the most popular places in the nation to have lunch, so I guess we should have attempted reservations sooner than the day before.
Unlike the swanky Carmel location of the main Cake Bake shop, which is over the top glitzy, the Broad Ripple location is on a rather nondescript street, nestled amongst other restaurants, small businesses, and lots of apartments and university housing. Finding a place to park the RV was a bit of a trick on these narrow, often one-way streets, and we eventually ended up on the street right in front of the Cake Bake shop, looking really large and out-of place on these diminutive streets. We thought it rather humorous that we were framed in the main window of the restaurant, like some sort of trailer trash in the middle of glitz.
But we wanted to give Abigail a sort of fairy-tale lunch experience and this was it, complete with the waiters in white tuxedos and unpronounceable menu items. The sandwiches were great, the accompanying salad was pickled in vinegar and the price tag was high, but this is vacation, right?
I’m sure they were glad when the RV was gone from the front of their store.
We drove for a little over an hour to reach Shades State Park and discovered that our assigned campsite as Shades State Park was one of the few with no shade. And with temperatures hovering just below 90 degrees and no electricity we were beginning to swelter in this tin can. So we moved to another site in the nearly-empty campground. Hot, but at least not in full sun.
Shades State Park is a bunch of ravines in an otherwise very flat area, you would never guess when driving through endless corn and soybean fields that this existed here. But here we are and we will probably take some day trips into nearby Turkey Run State Park, which shares similar landscape.
We hiked trail 5, which drops steeply into the Kintz ravine using lots of steps, then returns along the stream bed of the Kintz ravine, bypassing a couple waterfalls with stairs and ladders. A nice relatively-short hike for the end of the day
Hopefully it will cool down enough to sleep this evening. It was a bit warm last night and sleep was not optimal.
Miles traveled today: 79
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