We Took the Dog to the Beach

My partner and I are planning a big trip to meet up with our older kid in New Zealand this winter after her study-abroad program ends, so that's where our discretionary budget and disposable income are both going for the next few months. But still, I wanted to take some kind of trip this summer, because at this point, and especially with the older kid griping about how she'd missed the deadline for summer internships this year and plans to not make that mistake next year, every summer together could be our last summer all together. 

So what might my darling children want to do for a summer vacation that's possibly our last summer vacation for who knows when? Not express their gratitude that their parent wants to plan a vacation based on their preferences when nobody ever planned a vacation with her preferences in mind when she was a kid, that's for sure! Kids these days, am I right? Anyway, they mostly wanted to fight about it. The older kid really wanted a beach vacation that included her dog, but the younger kid hates beaches the most and would never willingly step onto a beach and do we not know that she is allergic to the sun and of course she does not need Vitamin D because she is "built different," etc. The younger kid wanted to go to a concert in Chicago but concerts, you may know, are not typically dog-friendly and so the older kid would like to understand how could we possibly be so cold-hearted as to so much as consider a vacation that did not include THE DOG.

Fortunately, after 15 years of this kind of crap, I can easily slash my way through these disagreements using my favorite go-to technique, fittingly entitled Please Neither of Them. In this case, Pleasing Neither of Them consisted of a couple of days at the Indiana Dunes National Park, during which the younger kid mostly hung out in the AirBnb or wandered around doing her own thing while the rest of us played at the beach with the dog, followed by a couple of days in Chicago, where the older kid and the dog mostly hung out in the hotel or walked around doing their own thing while the rest of us went to the Cavetown/Mother Mother concert.

The secret to Pleasing Neither of Them is that I personally LOVE both vacation ideas, so a Win/Lose for each of the brats is always a Win/Win for me!

On the way up north, I even got us to stop off for a long detour in Lafayette so we could check a few spots off in our Indiana Culinary Trails passports--I am grinding for that wine tumbler! 

Check out those clouds!

I'm a little mad that I ended up forgetting to order the Famous Fruit Drink from The Igloo on account of 1) the clouds were GLORIOUS that day, thanks to Hurricane Beryl remnants, 2) one of the kids is obsessed with clouds, and 3) the Igloo's parking lot had a tree blocking the "best" cloud so while my partner ordered and waited for our food I walked with the kids down the street to a better spot, thus forgetting to order the fancy juice I'd wanted to bring with us to our AirBnb. 

Ah, well, at least the kid has a dozen more beautiful cloud photos on her ipod to show for our efforts, and we did not forget the most important order, a pup cup for Luna!

We hit up a little more Lafayette local color--

--then finished up the rest of our drive to the lake. 

When my older kid and I took Luna to Indiana Dunes for the first time a few years ago, I LOVED the AirBnb we'd stayed at, so much so that I literally planned this vacation around its open dates. It's centrally located, sure, just minutes from all the beaches, includes ample parking, two bedrooms, and a complimentary bottle of wine, has a fenced-in backyard, and is comfortable and safe, but most importantly, especially to the younger kid, whose Netflix watchlist is longer than mine, it includes Netflix and Disney+, and y'all KNOW how we feel about streaming services! So the younger kid hardly acted put-upon at all during this leg of our trip, not when she could settle in to binge the entirety of Dead Boy Detectives while the rest of us hit up the Indiana Dunes National Park Visitor Center for parking passes and passport stamps and then took Luna to the beach:

She still loves it!

This trip, she discovered the additional joy of chasing seagulls--they just keep coming back for more!--and with three of us to take turns running her to exhaustion, there was also plenty of time for everyone else to do their lovely beach lounging:

Don't you love her doggy life jacket? It's a Ruffwear Float Coat, size medium. 

Below is the face of a dog who woke up from a nap to find themselves buried to the neck in sand! Somehow we got ourselves the world's most patient dog...

Both days at the beach, Luna was so exhausted that she kept trying to lie down during the long walk back to the car, and then she slept like a rock all evening while the rest of us ate take-out pizza and binged Netflix. I feel like I have taken most of my interior design ideas from the AirBnbs I've visited--that's how I learned about the joys of a ridiculously giant couch!--and from this one, I've sort of come away with the idea that wouldn't it be nice to have a TV in the family room. It was so cozy to all hang out on the couch and watch TV together in this AirBnb. But we also don't have anywhere in the family room at home to PUT a TV, if I'm being honest, nor anything to watch on it other than YouTube and library DVDs, sooo...

It WAS super cozy, though!

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When You're Bored in Indiana

The accepted advice is to get in the car and drive down backroads until you find something to do.

On the way, it's important to compare everyone's cornfields with the expertise that comes from never having been a farmer of corn, yourself, admire everyone's falling-down old barn, and verbally acknowledge every farm animal, with added enthusiasm if it's something on the weirder end like a miniature pony or a llama or a mule--Indiana is very horse- and cow-forward!

The other day, the three of us in the family who aren't nocturnal (tangent, but when the roommate selection form tells you to be honest in your responses, do they REALLY want you to admit to them that your bedtime is 6:00 am? Asking for... well, you know who I'm asking for, sigh...) were bored, so we took off down the back roads. Everyone's corn is looking pretty good, but those infinite fields of monocultures are a crying shame. Did you know that prior to pioneer incursion, forests covered over 85% of the state? It's VERY important to start bitching about monocultures after you pass your tenth cornfield or so. We saw some excellent barns, mostly threshing but some random-looking vernacular ones, too, and a shocking number of goats. 

We ended up at Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Indiana, where we browsed--

--I tried to suss out the titles of the Blind Date with a Book books using only their vague descriptions (when one of the clues is "Indiana author" it's always going to be John Green, not Gene Stratton-Porter), and the big kid got herself a brand-new, non-blind date book.

We later wandered into Madison Street Salvage--

--where the vintage Fiestaware--and honestly the vintage postcards and photos, too--were out of my personal budget--

--and I refused entirely to even look inside the glass case of dolls after I saw the sign on the front reading "Not Haunted" (nice try, Annabelle!), but I did buy myself a first edition of Ethel Hollister's First Summer as a Campfire Girl. It's in pretty poor condition so even at $3 I paid what it's worth, but I collect all the girl versions of the Tom Brown's School Days-type book, and I particularly like the Campfire Girl and Girl Scout books for their hilariously heavy pro-Scout propaganda. Here's my favorite quote so far from my new book:

[This Camp Fire Girl is going to be such an improvement over the ordinary girl. She's going to revolutionize young women and make of them useful members of society--not frivolous butterflies--and it will be carried into the poorer classes and teach girls who have never had a chance, so that they may become good cooks and housekeepers and love beautiful things. And their costume is so pretty and sensible.]

 Okay, then! At least they're not trying to come on too strong!

I did not buy the marquee letters or massive wooden mantelpiece that I wanted, but I might come back another time with the hardware for one of our house's original doors that I'm trying to refinish, because they've got a whole set of different skeleton keys that you can try out.

It does turn out, though, that one's wallet opens a little easier after one has had a nice, long free wine-tasting, ahem...

I believe I set a personal record for the amount of money spent on a single bottle of wine, but in my own defense, it is DELICIOUS.

Also, this kid cheats at checkers:

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All I Want Is To Irradiate Myself With Uranium Glass, and Other Small-Town Indiana Adventures

Our collective family favorite hobby is so boring that I'm honestly a little embarrassed to tell you about it.

No, it's not how we like to sit around a table and work puzzles while listening to audiobooks. That's genuinely awesome and not embarrassing at all.

It's embarrassing how much take-out pizza we eat, but that's not really a hobby.

Our hobby of making themed dinners and then watching movies while we eat is so cool that I don't understand why everybody else also doesn't do this weekly. Don't y'all WANT to be eating rainbow foods while sitting in your living room and watching Priscilla, Queen of the Desert? It's very fun!

This other hobby of ours is also very fun, but only in a very, very specific and highly-focused way, and probably only for us:

Basically, we drive to some seemingly random, poky little town and we just... poke around it? We get ice cream, check out the historical markers, browse the local shops, and exclaim over the most boring shit like, "Ooh, look at the limestone detail on that bank!" and "I wonder why they've got a Civil War cannon in their playground? Let's go climb on it!"

Just writing this out, it feels like an objectively awful way to spend a full day. The drive there and back is always ridiculously long, too, and requires verbally acknowledging every falling-down old barn and even slightly unusual farm animal we pass. This Sunday, y'all, we saw THREE miniature ponies! And a horse grazing in the same field with a bunch of cows! Many cornfields! A giant paintball arena out in the middle of nowhere cut out from the cornfields! Several threshing barns!

But I don't know, you guys. It is also, for some reason, a stupid amount of fun.

This particular adventure was inspired by Father's Day. We're also pretty obsessed with activity trails, either packaged ones like the Garfield Trail or ones that we DIY, like the indie bookstore trail that was my older kid's birthday gift a couple of years ago. We spent most of the pandemic doing a Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, and it might have been the thing that preserved my partner's sanity. He was PISSED when we finally completed the trail, sent in our passports, and all we got back were trucker caps as our prizes--acting bitchy about the prize is an important part of the tradition!

So for this Father's Day, I found a giant culinary trail put together by a statewide non-profit. It's got not just ice cream, but tenderloins. Pizza. Diners, drive-ins, and dives. Pie! We all signed up for it, my partner picked our first location, and off we drove through the cornfields to Greensburg, Indiana, a town whose claim to fame is that it's halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. Which, just between us, it's like two hours from Indianapolis to Cincinnati so I don't know if that's really helpful? If you lived in the middle you'd still have at least an hour commute either way, not counting city traffic, and if you were just going from one place to the other, well, it's only a two-hour drive so why would you need to stop smack in the middle?

Also, I don't understand why that's what they're promoting when as soon as we got there and parked at the town square, THIS is what we saw!!!

They have a tree growing out of their courthouse roof! 

It was baffling and cool and charming, and honestly kind of better that there's no informational signage around at ALL to explain what you're looking at. You just look up, see a tree growing out of the courthouse roof, and exclaim and wonder over it like it's the olden days. You could also literally just miss the tree if you parked on the other side of the courthouse and/or never happened to look up, and then how stupid would you feel later if someone told you about it?

I looked it up later, and these TripAdvisor reviews are cracking me up:

Like, guys. That tree is not even there for you. You don't need to give it a 3 out of 5 rating just for existing!

And for some reason it made TrishA4 mad. Is she contractually obligated to pay for clock tower repairs or something? Did poorly maintained gutters once kill her loved one?

Well, we weren't mad. It gave us something to talk about while we ate our pork tenderloins and French fries in a beach-themed bar and grill that had faux tiki huts and people playing pool inside. I was excited about the poster for a KISS cover band coming through, until a kid pointed out that the poster was from 2015, dang it. 2015 Julie would have ALSO loved to see a KISS cover band! 

After lunch, we walked around the courthouse square, checking out the other nearby restaurants on the culinary trail--

--and then we all got completely sidetracked for over an hour in Pickers Paradise, an antique store on the square. Their uranium glass was a VERY reasonable price!

I haven't worked up the nerve to start my own uranium glass collection yet, but I covet it SOOOO bad. All I need to do is put some black lights in Mamma's old china cabinet, right? Or would I need to store everything in a lead-lined coffin and only take them out on special occasions?

Anyway, I didn't buy the uranium glass, sob, but I did buy a really nice molinillo that my older kid found in a bin of kitchen accessories and recognized from a workshop on the history of chocolate that we took together last month. And then my younger kid found a really nice vintage poster in a pretty frame, and when my older kid told me about a cast iron horse bust that she'd thought was really cool I was all, "Your Dad is already buying me and your sister stuff. Go show him your horse head!" And that's how on Father's Day my partner walked out of an antique store having bought everybody BUT himself a nice little present, ahem.

But we all hugged his neck and told him we loved him!

We walked over to see a nice stretch of historic storefronts that had been restored (and then left to get slightly neglected again, but charmingly so), but our last stop before we drove back through the cornfields was another point on the culinary tour, a genuine A&W!

We didn't realize that this was a place where the waitstaff would come out to your car--I guess it's from the Just Cruisin' section of the culinary trail--so she threw us off our ordering game a bit. And then after she'd come and gone we realized that there was apparently an entirely other menu of specials taped to the window of the building where we hadn't been able to see it, and of course it was chock-full of stuff that everybody would have rather gotten, ahem, so we all sort of sulkily sucked down our chocolate shakes and cream freezes. The younger kid bitched the most about not knowing they had coffee shakes, but she also ate every bite of her ice cream cone while she bitched so I think she'll be okay.

On the way back home, I was trying to research why on earth there was a tree on the courthouse roof, and I realized that the city of Greensburg has a Wikipedia page! At first it was fun, making everyone try to guess the city's population and the name of their county and when their first post office was built--I'm really fun to travel with! But then I had to be all, "Oh, shit, y'all! Greensburg used to be a sundown town!"

Ugh, we are ALWAYS running into that around here! We won't even go to Martinsville, another former sundown town, on purpose, because it still feels really racist there, and this November will actually be the 100th anniversary of the time that the Ku Klux Klan won nearly every election, from school board up to governor, in our state but then couldn't keep hold of their offices or get anything of consequence done because, you know, they weren't politically or administratively trained--they were just organized racists! Halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati would have been an awful place to have a sundown town, though, sigh. 

But we're not going to spend our precious Father's Day talking about racists, so instead I went back to my most recent fun hobby of telling my partner, in detail, the entire story of A Court of Thorns and Roses so far. The drive was long, but this book is longer, because I had barely finished the part where everyone in Feyre's family had gotten fairy ensorcelled but Nesta, apparently because she's just too big a bitch to be ensorcelled, when we pulled back into our driveway. I put a pin in it until our next day trip!

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In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

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I'm Too Old for Junior Rangers, So Now I Collect Passport Stamps

Disclaimer: you're actually never too old for Junior Rangers; I'm pretty sure every national park will let you complete the workbook, take the oath, and pin the badge onto your T-shirt at any age!

HOWEVER, for my teenager's nineteenth birthday, I wanted to give her something that might recreate, for her, that enthusiasm that she always seemed to feel as a child for earning Junior Ranger badges. She has a huge collection of them, and I think took a lot of pleasure in earning new ones. Exploring new national park sites was something we've always loved doing together, and we have taken MANY a detour or special trip just to hit a new park so she could earn a new Junior Ranger badge.

So what might incorporate the same kind of fun?

The National Park Passport Book, I hope!

And, because sending this kid away to college has made me realize how precious (and how ever more preciously few) are the activities that she and I love to do together... I bought myself the National Park Passport Book, too. Now we can collect passport stamps for every single national park site TOGETHER!!!

First up: a day trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, sneaked in just a couple of weeks before she went back to college for the semester.

It's been several years since our last trip to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I was able to tell my partner and the teenager all the same Lincoln gossip that I'd told them the last time, and they were able to pretend like I haven't also been telling this same gossip continually even when we're not visiting the memorial.

Fun fact: this area used to be a major breeding ground for the passenger pigeon. Sigh...

My favorite thing here, though, is always the living history farm!

The teenager was HORRIFIED to see me pull a couple of weeds in this garden. But hello, I would love it if some stranger would wander by *my* garden and pull a few weeds!

Here's the well where the family drew their water, now at the very edge of the national park site and bordering a residential street:

It was SO muggy when we hiked this trail that all we talked about was how on earth people managed without air conditioning back then. Did you know that until his dying day, William Faulkner refused to have air conditioning in his Mississippi home? Putting a window air conditioning unit in their bedroom was just about the first thing his widow did after his funeral...

Because I bought us the bougiest passport books, they also have spaces for national park stickers, which is apparently also a thing. Every year they publish a new set of ten stickers, each featuring a different national park site from a different region. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial had several sticker sets in their gift shop, including the 2009 set that includes a sticker for the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, so I bought us both that one and then spent part of the car ride home busily sticking my new stickers in their correct spots.

I dunno if I'm sold on the stickers, though... They'd be objectively awesome if the images were good, but they weren't always. If I had to guess, I'd say that every national park site has to submit its own photo, and the small sites with limited staff maybe don't always have someone on staff to take a beautiful photo? 

Stay tuned to see if I end up buying more of the stickers, and DEFINITELY stay tuned for the teenager's next big college break, when she and I are going to knock some passport stamps off our to-do list!

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