We left the campground a little before noon and drove on to Chicago.

On the way we stopped at Elkhart, Indiana to go to the “RV and Motor Home Museum and Hall of Fame“ - apparently the RV industry grew large enough, and there was enough of an interest in RV-ing that they needed to honor themselves in a Hall of Fame.

While futzing around in the parking lot of the museum a couple walked up to us and struck up a conversation - they were from Cobleskill (upstate New York, near where Steve‘s from). They were there to pick up there new RV. It’s pretty amazing who you run into on the road.

Steve wanted to go see how living quarters were arranged to accommodate such small spaces. In addition to having campers and RV’s and mobile homes that we could climb into, they had a neat display about a high-rise RV apartment building. Each building consisted of a central auto-elevator, with a perimeter of twelve or so RV “plug-in“ units where each RV could pull in. Apparently one was built sometime in the late 60’s early 70’s in the mid-West somewhere. I think it’s been demolished.

Driving on towards the Indiana Sand Dunes, we passed by a nuclear power plant cooling tower. What a weird sight. Not only was there a huge cooling tower looming over you…the fact was the huge cooling tower looming over you was built right next to a small residential area.

Anyway, onto the sand dunes. This was definitely not what I was expecting. We drove into a treed parking lot, I opened my eyes and there was a wall of sand hundreds of feet high in front of me. This turned out to be Mount Baldy, the highest hill in a sand dune complex on the south shore of lake Michigan, surrounded by woods, the nuke plant and a state park. I was expecting to simply climb up this dune and see a few more dunes in the middle of the forest. When we finally made it to the top, instead of trees, we saw the lake spreading out before us to the horizon. Dipped our toes into the cold, cold waters.

After so much excitement we continued our drive west to Chicago. Got in late, had ribs for dinner (yum!), and crashed.