By the morning the rain had changed to a light drizzle and we made breakfast of eggs/bacon and oatmeal, packed up our very wet tent, and headed out of the campground. We quickly stopped by the camp office that was finally open, and I had a quick chat with the older lady. I asked if they had any WIFI and her answer was no, but she suggested a McDonald’s of a Wendy’s would likely have it. We knew a McDonald’s would so we decided to just get back on the interstate and stop if we came across one. It didn’t take us long of course to arrive to one (they really seem to be everywhere along the interstate), and we finally figured out the minor setting we had to change on our phones and we were all set up with 5G data (better than the 4G we get back home). Live and learn. Although we had all just had breakfast everyone ended up getting a hamburger (except Katherine because of her soy allergy, she just had coffee). The prices were on par with what we have in Canada but with the exchange rate it was basically all about 35% more expensive.
We stopped at the town of Paw Paw, where they had a nice playground. While the kids played and we dried out our soaking wet tent, I read up on the small town of about 3000 people. It was interesting to see they had a well set up football field and a baseball field but no soccer field in sight. Those two traditional sports definitely seemed to be rooted in the area but we did come across a high school along the interstate that had a number of nice soccer fields (it may have been even turf). There was a kid having a complete meltdown at the park and it was nice it wasn’t our problem to deal with for a change.
We made our way towards our destination, and stopped at the Indiana Dunes visitor center. Indiana Dunes is an interesting park in that it has a State Park surrounded by the National Park. Even though we were gong to be camping at the state park, we decided we might as well pick up our annual US national park pass here. We then headed towards our Indiana Dunes State Park campground. This campground is fully booked every day during the summer but we were able to get a site from a cancellation a week before. Driving along the interstate is very quick and fairly straight forward until you approach bigger cities, but you really couldn’t appreciate the area travelling along them. Even though Lake Michigan was right there we could not see it from the highway at all and wouldn’t have been the wiser if it wasn’t for looking at a map. A very different way to travel compared to our bike trip from 13 years ago!
Despite stopping for over an hour at the park we made good time and we arrived to the campground around 3:30pm. The one hour time change into central time certainly helped.
Upon arrival you could immediately tell this was a great campground. Kids were everywhere and everyone seemed to be very friendly and having a good time. Only $30 a night with full electrical hook up and paved driveways, nice facilities and easy walking access to a amazing beach, dunes, and fantastic hiking trails. We could see why it was such a popular spot. After all the campgrounds and playgrounds we had been to so far in life, we feel like we could write a book about them. The kids found a couple small toads and that kept them occupied for sometime.
We very much enjoyed the nicer weather and after setting up camp and having dinner of tacos we made the short hike to the beach. We were blown away by the size of the beach and the dunes themselves. The kids had a great time running up and down the dunes, making huge jumps into the sand, and tumbling and crashing down the dunes. We are so used to having dunes being so fragile and protected in Ontario it was interesting how that wasn’t so much the case here because the dunes were literally mountains. It was also an incredible sight to see the Chicago skyline across the lake. It was hard to imagine that’s where we’d be staying the next night.
Despite having showers the kids still managed to get sand everywhere into the tent.
Trip Around The World 
Leave a comment