By: Samie

Travel Dates: July 2015

Drive day stretch Two

(Wisconsin to Kentucky)

In part one of this journey, my family and I (my family being my mom, sister Rebekah, and step brother Tyson) made our way from Watertown, South Dakota to Madison, Wisconsin in July of 2015.

After a restful evening in our hotel, we arose eager to get going on the next stretch of our trek! We would be making it all the way to Kentucky with a few fun stops along the way, making this second travel day more exciting than the first as there hadn’t been much between our starting and ending point.

We piled into our designated road trip seats in the van, and I attempted to snap a photo of us kids as we took off. However, Rebekah decided to fake sleep instead (quite convincingly I might add).

It was only about an hour drive until we crossed into our next state of Illinois, making it our 4th state in only 2 days! We popped into the Illinois Welcome Center in South Beloit to use the bathroom and get our state welcome sign picture in a convenient and safe location.

We then hit the road again and made the approximately 2 hour drive down and over to our next state of Indiana. We had now crossed into/out of the borders of 5 states in only 2 days!

Indiana marked the first state to offer up the opportunity for a small side quest within our grand adventure. Our first stop in the state was in Hammond. Hammond is a city in Indiana with a population of about 76,000 and only about 30 minutes south from Chicago.

What makes Hammond special is that it is where the film A Christmas Story gets its roots! For starters, the film is based on stories by Jean Shepherd, who grew up in Hammond. The fictional town of Hohman in the movie is a stand-in for Hammond, borrowing its name from Hohman Avenue, which is a major street in down town Hammond. Also, the movie includes references to places from Shepherd’s childhood, such as Cleveland Street and Warren G. Harding Elementary School. Some of the characters and places are inspired by real people and places from Hammond. The city celebrates its connection to the movie with an annual exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center, featuring animatronic window displays depicting scenes from the film and a statue of Flick with his tongue stuck to the flagpole.

Well, I’ll give you one guess as to where our first stop and photo op was!

From Hammond, it was about a 40 minutes drive to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which became Indiana Dunes National Park on February 15th, 2019, about 4 years after our visit. This made it the 61st National Park in the U.S. The weather wasn’t particularly favorable. It was cloudy and rainy, but we weren’t about to let that stop us! We tossed on some disposable ponchos and began our hike.

We took the Dune Succession Trail, an approximately 1 mile loop with a terrain made up of a combination of loose sand, boardwalks, forest, stairs, and bringing you down to the beach with scenic views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline.

With the rain darkening the sand, our steps broke through the very thin layer of moisture on top, leaving stark white footprints behind us as we began our walk. Once on the boardwalk, we very quickly came a cross the first set of the many stairs to come.

After the first few flights and turns, Lake Michigan came into view in the hazy background. While both the sky and lake were wearing shades of gray that day, the gray of Lake Michigan was a darker shade that we were able to make out and tell the difference between.

We continued making our way down and along the boardwalk until it took us down into a tree-covered section of the area. It was suddenly like we had been transported from a sandy beach walkway to a rainy forest hike. Although we could no longer see Lake Michigan, the view was now beautiful for a completely different reason!

Although my counting may not have been perfect, I counted that we walked down a total of 467 steps before we finally stepped onto the shoreline of Lake Michigan. After those steps, the very young Rebekah was absolutely over the whole walking thing, so my mom draped her little legs over her shoulders and continued walking on the beach now another foot taller.

We enjoyed our breezy and wet stroll along the shore of Lake Michigan. The sizable waves crashed along the sand, marking the wet areas from the dry. We enjoyed seeing the different plants and logs scattered as we walked before it was time to turn around and make our way back up the steps and to the car so that we could leave this small adventure behind in order to continued with our larger one.

Apparently taking the stairs didn’t wipe Rebekah out as much as see might have claimed because she had enough energy to be bored as we hit the road again. The way she decided to resolve that boredom was to draw all over her face. She should’ve given it a few minutes, however, because she then promptly passed out for a nice little nap.

After about a two and a half hour drive, we were driving through Indianapolis! As a young woman that grew up on the very flat eastern side of South Dakota, I was thrilled by seeing a large city skyline! Even though it was just a drive through, and we weren’t stopping, I still managed to enjoy my time in Indianapolis.

At one of our next stops, I came across a souvenir that I just couldn’t bear to leave behind. Anyone that knows me well will not be at all surprised to hear that I picked up a giant stuffed giraffe to accompany us on our journey. It was nearly half my height, and yes, I still have it to this day. Present day, my students get to enjoy its company on our classroom Giraffe Day that we do at the end of the year.

After driving about 2 hours from Indianapolis, we crossed the border into Kentucky and finding a welcome center to stop and take our state border picture. A fun discovery that we made was that the architecture of the bathrooms and welcome centers all model the old southern charm.

We made our way to our hotel around Livingston, Kentucky for the night. It was another day down. Fortunately, the next day, although it would be another full day of travel, we would be arriving at our destination. We went to bed, looking forward to the last length of road that would take us to Charlotte, North Carolina! Stay tuned for next time!