In September 2002 I set out on a road trip. My plan was to fairly-well cover the southern half of Indiana, but there's so much more to see than I anticipated that I barely saw the southwestern quadrant; even then, I skipped several places I would have liked to have visited.

 

Spine of a substantial and growing greenway system, the Monon trail runs 10.5 miles from 10th Street to 96th Street, where it continues for another five miles as the Carmel-Clay Monon Greenway. Along the way, it passes the Indiana State Fairgrounds and connects with the Central Canal Towpath, the Fall Creek Trail, and the White River Wapahani Trail. The trails are well-designed and maintained, with adequate width, paved surface and good signage, and heavily used.

 

 

 

 

 

 

White River State Park brings together many of the city's entertainment and recreation venues, including the zoo, Indiana State Museum and Eiteljorg Museum, all located within walking distance of the state capitol and Monument Circle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About an hour south of Indianapolis, Bloomington is home to Indiana University. The 3,750-seat IU Auditorium houses the world's largest pipe organ and features 20 panels of Thomas Hart Benton's 1933 mural depicting the history of Indiana

 

 

Noted American Impressionist painter Theodore Clement Steele built the House of the Singing Winds in 1907 on a hill in Brown County, east of Bloomington. The property is now T.C. Steele State Historic Site.

 

 

 

 

My camper. I wasn't getting enough use out of it to justify the money I had tied up in it, so I sold it three or four years ago. Probably just as well, considering what it would cost to run the four-ton beast now and the increased cost of camping in state parks.

 

Brown County comes as a surprise to those who, when they think of Indiana, envision endless miles of mostly-flat fields of corn and soybeans interspersed with subdivisions near the cities. These views are from within Brown County State Park. The mostly hardwood forests make Brown County a popular tourist destination during fall foliage season.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring Mill State Park, near Mitchell, Indiana features a restored early-19th-century pioneer village centered around a working 1817 grist mill with a stone mill powered by a large wheel driven with water from a spring in a nearby hillside. The park has trails, lakes, caves, and an inn noted among local people for good food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great pics! The museums look pretty impressive!

Brown County really is a treasure.  Fantastic photos!

I was at Spring Mill Park every year for a few years while in high and jr high school in Kentucky.  Our school bus driver was a contract driver for the school board, meaning she owned her own bus.  She would take us riders to Spring Mill at the end of the school year at the end of the school year, for a picnic and swimming in that lake lake.  Since her route was a neighborhood thing this became a neighborhood outing of sorts. 

 

I've been to the restored pioneer village and mill too, a few times, outside of that, with my family.

 

We never made it to Brown County, though, for some reason.

 

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That White River park and canal way is pretty cool.  I was impressed that they actually restored that canal..or that it even survived.  The Indiana State Musuem was pretty impressive when i went.  I was planning on seeing both that Wesern museum and the state museum during my trip to Indy a few years ago, but just got totally engrossed in the Indiana museum and didnt have time for the western one.

 

 

Spring Mill is one of my favorite places. The mill was restored from a ruin in the 1930s by the state; they searched downstream to find enough pieces of the water wheel to determine how it was built. The spring that feeds the mill flume is a remarkable sight in spring and early summer when its flow is at peak. There's an opening about three or four feet across in a rock face, and it gushes water like a culvert pipe after a storm.

 

There are flooded caves in the park, too, with boat tours in one of them.

 

Southern Indiana woodlands have a unique aroma, very different from the woods in the northern part of the state where I live, probably because of different types of vegetation, soil and soil organisms. I first noticed it in the 1960s when I spent time at Indiana University and made weekend drives into the surrounding countryside. It's very rich and pleasing, and whenever I return the smell of the woods takes me back to those days.

 

Despite the growth of tourism around Nashville (IN), it's still fairly easy to find places where you're out of sight and hearing from the commotion and immersed in surroundings that probably look and feel very much as they did in the nineteenth century.