Saturday 22 June
We were thankful this morning to have achieved some rest last night. Despite our nervousness about our accommodation, the only disturbance was some people talking loudly outside the motel door early this morning. After breakfast in the RV in the parking lot, we headed towards Indianapolis via Dayton.
Dayton’s Visitor Centre was closed on weekends, and no one was very helpful, so we kept moving out of Ohio and into Indiana. As we got near, there were roadworks that delayed our trip along the highway by a WHOLE HOUR. Ironically, we crossed a time zone and earned that hour back! Ross needed a break, so he asked to stop for lunch at a restaurant called “Steak n Shake” (he is still in search of a decent milkshake over here). We were accosted by an older African American lady as soon as we exited the RV. She needed $20 for gas, she said, because her daughter and newborn granddaughter were waiting in a nearby car and she had no money left. Zac wanted to return to the motorhome and get for her the $1 the tooth fairy had left for him a couple of nights ago (yes, the tooth fairy found him in America more reliably than she arrives in Oyster Bay), but Ross took the approach of offering to call 911 for the lady to get her some serious help, at which point she walked away. The kids are still talking about that tonight.
The restaurant Ross wanted to try was so packed with customers the empty tables hadn’t yet been cleared, so we decided to skip it and return to Denny’s, where kids eat free today 😉 The waitresses there were lovely, but the whole operation was quite inefficient which made me wonder if the other restaurant was really packed or just inefficiently run as well.
Lunch took longer than we intended, so we got into the city of Indianapolis after 3pm. We headed straight to Monument Circle intending to climb the 331 steps of the monument there. The Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument is only 21 feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty, and was erected to honour veterans of the American Revolution and US Civil War. As we approached the stairs to the observation deck, we were told it was closed for the rest of the afternoon because someone had thrown up up there and it had not yet been cleaned!! I considered offering to clean it just so we could climb it… sadly, Ross was really looking forward to it, so told me he would put it on his bucket list to do someday. I was quite pleased he was making a bucket list, until I saw the gleam in his eyes and his sarcastic snigger…
From there we drove 8 miles to the Indiana Motor Speedway where the Indy 500 occurs. We missed the only entrance not fenced off, so just drove slowly around the perimeter looking in. It is smaller up close than it seems.
My original plan was to reach St Louis tonight, but that is too far, so we are stopping along the way. We picked the town of Casey (famous for the largest wind chime in the world according to the Guiness Book of Records…not that I am reading the Guinness Book of Records, the announcement was in the RV guide…), arriving at 6.30pm thinking that would allow the kids some out-of-RV playtime while we unpack and cook dinner. Unfortunately it is raining!! (Stay tuned, there may be a future post entitled ‘Cabin Fever’ hahaha) 😉
Actually, the managers here put on an all-you-can-eat icecream social for $2.50 per child (Tinks, I had to be social!!!!), followed by a free movie and popcorn night. The kids enjoyed watching Kung Fu Panda, I had all my laundry washed and dried by the time the movie finished, and on the way back to our motorhome we saw fireflies nearby. A lovely evening enjoyed by us all!