We Finally Finished the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail (and It Only Took 2 Years...)

Indiana murals are always SO weird.

The Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail was one of our first Pandemic Projects, and just might be the last of the original 2020 projects that we were still working on this summer. 

Like, we completely finished our collective obsessions with charcuterie boards, paint-by-numbers--

--and recreating TikTok recipes. I visited every Girl Scout camp in the state, and the kids ate every kind of Little Debbie that there is. Matt made every one of the 100 Famous Cocktails. One of my kids earned a YouTube Silver Play Award. The other kid grew a lot of strawberries.

But in between all of that and afterwards, ice cream remained part of the family dream. 

We're just barely in Southern Indiana, so almost every ice cream place involved quite a long trek. And for most of them, we also found something scenic to do, whether it was visiting a water wheel, a German cemetery, and a locally famous geologic feature, or uncovering the Masonic roots of historic downtown:

In Salem, we also happened upon an interesting piece of local history. This raid is one of the "lands" of Conner Prairie, a local living history park, and the kids and I have visited 1863 Civil War Journey numerous times (including that one time that led to both kids unconscious on the ground and a security escort out of the park), but it had never occurred to me to check out any of the REAL raid sites!

This ice cream trail was a really great way to spend time together during a pandemic. We got to get out of the house and do a little sightseeing, but it was easy to stay in the fresh air and away from strangers. We got to bring Luna along--

--and the long car rides recreated some of the things I best love about travel, that isolated space for conversations and audiobooks and sibling quarrels, as well as siblings having fun and acting adorable:

The only sad thing about the ice cream trail is that way back in 2020, when we first started it, the prize for completing every stop on the trail was a T-shirt. So OMG you would not even have wanted to see Matt's face when we finally made our final stop a few weeks ago (The Happy Hive in Marengo, although alas, we didn't have time to also go to Marengo Cave like I'd planned, because the younger kid had to work that night. I'm hoping to snooker everyone into visiting the cave with me later this summer), and then Matt finished filling in the forms with our address and T-shirt sizes, sent them in, waited by the mailbox for several more weeks, and then got a package with pictures of ice cream cones all over it in the mail, and...

Sometime in the past two years, the prize switched from T-shirts to caps. Matt is SO sad!

If you see Matt doing errands around town wearing his Discover Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail cap, can you please tell him that it looks really cool and wow, visiting every stop on the ice cream trail must have been a major accomplishment to earn such an awesome cap? Because I have tried telling him that the real treasure was the friendships we made along the way, but he is not buying it and would way rather have had a T-shirt.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!