Unlike yesterday, today the weather was great! – A perfect day for driving and exploring the Indiana country side.
We started out the day after sleeping in a bit and headed from Perrysburg, OH into the city of Toledo itself for an early lunch at Tony Packo’s Cafe. This place, if you are not familiar, was made famous by the character Corporal Max Klinger on the TV series M*A*S*H. The featured items on the menu are “Hungarian Hot Dogs” and various derivatives of things you can make by pouring a very tasty chili over pretty much anything. Albeit somewhat decadent, the food was quite good. The hot dogs reminded us of the “Coneys” at Skyline Chili available in the the Cincinnati area, also a place worth trying if you have a chance.
Another kind of cool quirky thing about Tony Packo’s is that they have this huge collection of hot dog rolls that are signed by celebrity types and posted on the wall. We saw the Jerry Seinfeld hot dog roll and even a Barbara Bush signed roll. There are dozens if not hundreds of signed hot dog rolls throughout the place.
Rolling out of the restaurant and onto US-20 we made our way into Indiana to rural farm country of rolling hills with lots and lots of corn….all knee high (or better) for July. Besides the corn, you also start to see lots and lots of Amish folks as well. This comes to a peak in the town of Shipshewana, IN where horses and buggies are about of as common as cars. OK, that is probably an exaggeration, but there are many to be found and lots of other neat stuff to be seen in the town as well. This is well evidenced by the following photo:
After dodging all the horse pucky along the road on our way out of town, we jumped back on the Interstate and shot over to South Bend to check out the golden dome of Notre Dame.
Notre Dame has a beautiful campus and no shortage of history itself. After a walk around the campus, we moved from South Bend, back onto the Interstate, and then made our way over to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore which is a national park facility on the shores of Lake Michigan.
We had no idea this place even existed before. It is great! - Huge sand dunes and beautiful beaches that feels more like the Outer Banks of North Carolina than Indiana. We spent the later part of the afternoon and early evening working off lunch by hiking up the Mount Baldy Dune and then making our way down to the beach and walking the shoreline for a bit.
We completed the day by making the final drive from Indiana into Illinois, and stopping for the night in Elgin, IL which is just about 20 miles past Chicago.
Tomorrow we are back onto US-20 (The Oregon Trail) and will be heading across Iowa to Sioux City for one of the longer driving days of the entire trip at about 450 miles.
