Night Away

For Anniversary/Christmas I got Kip a "night away." With me presumably. Although when I gave him his gift, he did say something like, "Well, this is kind of a gift for you too then." To which I said something like, "Well, you can go by yourself if you want, but I think you'll have more fun if I come along." I thoroughly believe this to be true.

At any rate, I found a cabin up in the Middle-of-Nowhere, IN and we went at the end of April. The town was tiny and reminded me (and Kip) of my hometown. Just a few roads, a gas station, and a burger joint. What more do you need, right? The cabin was so so gorgeous and gave me new-floor-and-curtain-envy, which is a problem any time I go somewhere nice. But I was glad to have new-floor-and-curtain-envy instead of musty-rug-and-gross-bathroom unenvy.

One of the reasons I picked Middle-of-Nowhere, IN was because I'd wanted to spend some time hiking and just enjoying nature. I was told that there was plenty of hiking nearby where we could spend "days." And there were a lot of cool rock bluffs located along roads with no trails whatsoever, a graffitied spring, and a cave (that was featured in the pictures sent to me of the area, but which was straight up in someone's backyard--like with lawn ornaments leaning up against it). There was also jug rock. We were told this was a must-see. And indeed it was super cool. The funny thing was that for this mother of all sights there was one (ONE) parking spot--with the little sign telling us what it was. Fortunately for me and Kip we were the only ones there, so we took that parking spot and followed the little trail down to Jug Rock. (On Saturday there were two cars trying to jam into that spot--phew, good thing we went Friday).

There it is: Jug Rock. 

And here's the graffiti spring.

There was also a state park (Martin), which was the dumpiest state park ever with all of 1/4 mile of hikeable trail. Fortunately for us, we drove a little further (30 minutes) away to a state park called Spring Mill State Park, which was thoroughly awesome in every way and had trails and a pioneer village and which we could have spent days at and which we plan to return to with our kids on a camping trip.

Spring Mill Creek

Look at me and Kip rocking all these selfies.

Forgive all the pictures of me. I have to say that one of my favorite things about this trip is that there were several pictures of me that I liked. This is ridiculous and vain (and embarrassingly insecure), but over the last ten years there have probably only been maybe a handful of non-professional pictures of myself that I have liked. It makes me sad every single time we get pictures. "Oh there's my beautiful family and there I am looking like an alien with dysentery (told you--vain). Sorry. It's lame and insecure, but it's true. Here we got several good pictures in just two days and I was really happy about it. It was a random-weekend-in-late-April miracle. So you guys have to look at--that's right--me.  

We also drove in the opposite direction to French Lick. Which was also beautiful and was a delightful thing to do without our kids. If we'd taken them, we would have been in the car for more than 7 minutes and therefore would have suffered from torrential whine syndrome. As it was we could just fantasize about buying a little rental property up in the hills of Indiana near French Lick and spending a couple weeks there every summer. Aaahhh.