Felt like a long day today.   After all the activities of the last few days we got off to a slow start.  Today was sort of the start of part 4 of our trip.  Part 1 was Glacier National Park.  Part 2 was long haul driving to see parks across the North and spread out around Lake Superior.  Part 3 has been the people part of the trip.  Now Part 4 is going to be closer to our usual sightseeing type of traveling.  We will be visiting parts of the country we have either never seen or only quickly driven through, including Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, with many places to see related to our country’s history.

One more park today: Indiana Dunes, number 8 for the trip.  This is an area where the cooperative work of local people plus state and county govenment has resulted in the preservation of and public access to over 15 miles of shoreline at the bottom of Lake Michigan.  I couldn’t help thinking that a few projects along this line to make more ocean and lake shoreline available to the public back in our city of Seattle would be a good thing.

We saw one new license plate, Indiana, bringing the count to 41.  Indiana brings us to 10 states visited so far. We also passed the 4,000 mile mark and our little Prius is holding up well.

As a genealogist I had a desire to see the Allen County Library in Fort Wayne Indiana.  It is one of the top rated public libraries in the country, particularly related to researching family history,  I did get to see the library, but between traffic out of Chicago, more time than expected at the Indiana Dunes, a longer time for lunch than usual, and a error on my part in failing to realize we were passing into the Eastern Time Zone, we did not really have time for me to do any research.  Nothing particular I was going to look for so nothing lost.  Anyway, family cemeteries national parks and presidential sites await us tomorrow.