Not much to say here. We tried once more to pay for our campsite, but there was still no one to take our money. Oh well.
We started out across the midwest. My dad was born in the Midwest and every time I visit, I can see why he left. It isn’t the place for me.
We drove about 500 miles today, and only saw a handful of notable sights.
While exploring a town in Pennsylvania we spotted a house with a false thatched roof, similar to the roof of my parents’ house.
A house with a false thatched roof. Not as intricate as my parents’, but still a rare find.
About the only really unique thing we did today was tour Thomas Edison’s birthplace. Edison was born in Milan, OH. We took the tour of the house, unfortunately my phone was once again dead, so I didn’t get any pictures until I got back to the car to charge it. I have read books about Edison in the past, but the number of things he invented always astounds me. In order to perfect the mimeograph, Edison invented wax paper. Apparently little is known about the process of inventing wax paper, but it was Edison who did it. Amazing.
The house Thomas Edison was born in. It was very cool to see some of the traditional tools and methods that Edison obviated with his inventions.
We arrived at Dunewood campground in the Indiana Dunes State Park reasonably early, after putting the pedal to the metal through Ohio.
This is a park to avoid completely. Uncaring camp hosts, an automated machine with a broken credit card reader used to pay for your campsite, habituated raccoons, very loud train and highway noise, and bugs are just a few reasons to avoid it. The walk-in sites were closed, so we chose an available site off the loop road. The camp hosts came by to tell us to hang our receipt (which took 10 minutes to get from the broken machine). The reason we hadn’t hung it was the lack of a clip, which all the other sites had. Despite reporting this to the camp hosts, they merely insisted that we hadn’t seen it and drove off. The only good part about this camp site was the free hot shower stalls.
During this trip I had planned to visit a friend of mine, Kelsey. Kelsey lived in Washington for a while before moving back to the Midwest with her mom in the final year of high school. She lives in Iowa, and we were planning a special detour to see her, but it turned out that she had something to do for work in Chicago at the same time we were camping in Indiana. Downtown Chicago is only about an hour from Dunewood campground, so we headed out for a visit.
It was great to see Kelsey again, and Paul had a lot in common with her. We enjoyed a couple beers and returned to our campsite to get bit by bugs, and hissed at by pissy raccoons.