Rural Indiana

I've actually been in Chicago for a few days, but I'll write about that later because I've got a few more days here.  If you can't wait to see what I've been up to, though, check out my High Noon pics.

I wanted to get some pics and thoughts down about my drive through rural Indiana, on my way to and from Lafayette.  I might have only been on the road for about 6 hours total in Indiana, but it was the kind of road I really like to drive:  Gentle curves, very little traffic, one or two lane country roads.  Well, two lanes are better than one because I never quite know how to navigate around the inevitable farm equipment going 20 mph on the one-lane roads.  But you get my drift.

This one stretch of road in NW Indiana had windmills as far as the eye could see.

But while I very much like driving on these kind of roads, I would not enjoy living in these kinds of towns.  In large measure, because the "cuisine" leaves a lot to be desired.  For instance, I stopped at a road-side diner.  The prices were good and it had car hops even.  But it had only one vegetable item on the whole menu -- deep fried cauliflower -- which I ordered because it sounded healthier than the deep fried everything else, but still wasn't that healthy.  Nor that tasty, after the first few morsels -- too much deep and too much fried, and not enough cauliflower.

Later, I stopped at a rural grocery.  Now I didn't expect it would be full of delicacies, but I just wanted fruit.  But even the fruit was... not so great.  Only one kind of apple (red delicious, of course... how dull!).  And the blueberries, which are in season now, were very mediocre and were imported from Georgia.  So they were designed to be hearty and to travel well, not to be plump and bursting.  Other fruit and veggie selections were equally uninteresting.  Why live so close to food sources if the food available at the local shops is neither local nor particularly good?

Bad food aside, at least some rural areas have something I really like:  Old graveyards, with actual tombstones, not those lame modern graveyards where everything is flat because the grass is easier to mow.  /rolls eyes at lazy graveyard caretakers/  Since I had a lot of time to kill between Lafayette and Chicago, I stopped and toured a couple.  None were as old as any in Europe (of course) and not were as colorful and fun as the Easter Island graveyard, but they were pretty cool anyway, and I got my fix of the macabre.

An older specimen, from the mid-19th Century

A very unusual gravestone:  Just a metal plate bolted to the earth.  I can't recall seeing another like this anywhere.