This year's national park visit was to Indiana Dunes, which is a 2 1/2 day journey from home. After a brief stop - and a picnic lunch - at the main visitor's center, we set up camp at site #19 in Dunewood Campground. It was a nice "home away from home" for the week.
We knew that Indiana Dunes was a new national park, created in 2019. While there we noticed they're still in the process of switching signage. We also learned how it became a national park. Someone (probably a congressman from Indiana) stuck four lines of text into a massive 2,000 page budget bill. The bill passed, and Indiana Dunes National Park came into existence. It totally surrounds Indiana Dunes State Park, and the three tallest dunes are actually inside that park. We decided not to pay the extra fee and battle the extra crowds to go there; we had plenty to do to keep us busy in the national park portion. We made brief stops at the eight designated beaches in the park, ate our picnic lunches in various picnic areas, and hiked all the hiking trails. Maybe someday we'll return with bikes to do all the biking trails, but probably not. It wasn't too hot, and it wasn't too rainy; overall, we had a very nice time.
Although we're not sure Indiana Dunes deserves national park status, we did have a wonderful time exploring what it had to offer - beaches, dunes, hills, forests and lovely wildflowers. Of course, this trip will also be remembered for the van's problems. Before we left, we took it into the mechanic to have the air conditioning fixed, and after two weeks it still wasn't blowing super cold air, but they put it back together and we were on our way, albeit twelve hours later than we had planned (which meant we cancelled our first hotel room in Georgia, and drove through the night instead). The blessing in that was the peace I felt while sitting around home for a day, all packed up and ready to load without a vehicle to use. We were also thankful we didn't have to go to Plan B - cancel camping and just take the car and use hotels, Plan C - rent a vehicle big enough to carry our equipment, or Plan D - postpone the entire trip.
Then, while in Indiana, after stopping at Walmart to get ice and a few groceries, we came out to the van and it wouldn't start. We had been warned that the battery would need to be replaced soon, so it wasn't really a surprise, and we appreciated we were parked at a place where we could buy a battery. Of course, it wasn't quite that simple (apparently you have to have your vehicle parked in a certain spot before the mechanics will write up a work order), but just before closing, we had a new battery. Then we discovered that while the car would start, it wouldn't go!
Of course this was a Friday night at 7 PM!! So, we ended up calling AAA anyway. Long story short, we found a repair shop open on Saturday, got the van towed there, found a hotel within walking distance to spend the night, returned to meet the mechanics when they arrived in the morning, and they were able to diagnose and repair the problem, and we were back to
hiking that afternoon. We're grateful for little miracles and tender mercies.
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