Laporte County: The Dunes
Continuing in our journey of counties, we recently took a 3 day weekend trip to the Indiana Dunes to explore and see the sights.
We left around 10AM on Friday, June 3rd from the Columbus airport and ventured to Michigan City airport, KMGC, a distance of about 152 nautical miles. Travel time was about 90 minutes, which is much more pleasant than a 4 hour car ride.
While daddy did his thing, Isaac did his thing.
We got to KMGC, and called for the rental car. While waiting, I refilled the airplane.
We were nicely upgraded to a new Ford Explorer, which is downright huge compared to my Infiniti G37 I’m used to. Plenty of space for everything, and it had a lot of bells and whistles. A very impressive car.
We headed over to the hotel to drop off stuff. Isaac fell in love with the elevator buttons, and the automatic opening/closing doors in the hotel lobby. The emergency call button in the hotel elevator was pressed no less than 3 times during our trip.
From here, we drove to the shore area where all of the stuff was happening, about a 15 minute drive from the hotel, and looked around, but never really found a good lunch option. At this point we were starving, and began heading back towards the hotel where we knew food options existed. We ended up at McDonalds. Not our first choice of dining establishments, but it was a safe bet, particularly with the food allergies we have to deal with with the kiddo.
Our first destination of choice was Mt. Baldy, a tall sand dune that is a landmark and a sight to see. We ventured towards where we thought it was, but turns out we were way off and heading in the complete wrong direction. However, we did get sight of a really neat abandoned grain elevator on the railroad lines following the shore.
Back on course again, we found Mt. Baldy and parked and walked to it. After leaving your car, the walk is pretty hard, as it’s mostly an uphill sand trail.
Hiking the summit
From the summit
Once you go over Mt. Baldy, the other side is Lake Michigan, with shoreline to play in. Isaac had no trouble in finding important things to do.
However, the trouble with this particular beach was manifold:
- The sand was super hot thanks to the sun, so walking without shoes was uncomfortable. Walking with shoes was hard too, as they filled with sand. Flip flops were best here.
- Right up on the shoreline is much bigger rocks – I think this is intentionally done to help with erosion. These rocks just tore up my feet, so I left my shoes on.
- Right by the water was sand again, but wet, like quicksand, so hard to balance on.
- The water was around 55 degrees, making it downright unpleasant to even put your feet in unless you are a small kid who doesn’t know any better.
We stayed here long enough to feel like we made use of our time, then headed on to other things.
One of the tourist maps we got gave us a few highlight destinations of the county, so we picked a couple out to continue onward to see. Further inland we ventured to Purdue University’s North Central campus, which was advertised to have 50 sculptures to see. In fact, the campus (which is rather large) had lots of sculptures all over the place – but it was more of a “drive around and see them” vs. some kind of walking tour. We snapped a few pics:
From there we headed southward to Bluhm County Park (still in Laporte County). This 96 acre park was donated in 1992 and is a really nice little place to stop and walk or play. There are quite a few walking trails, a boardwalk, biking/horseriding areas, and a playground. We did a short walk, and spent a little bit on the playground.
Dinner loomed large, so we headed back to the other side of the county to a little brick oven pizza place that we read about, called Stop 50. We got breadsticks for the kid, and a veggie pizza for mom & dad. Sadly the only picture I got was a poor one of the oven.
The whole thing was delicious, and Isaac flirted with the staff the entire time.
After dinner we headed over to Washington Park Beach, which had a $6 parking fee. However, the beach was much nicer and more pleasant than Mt. Baldy from earlier in the day, and much more accessible.
Isaac loved this place because there were a lot of seagulls to chase.
At this park is also the Michigan City Lighthouse, the only lighthouse on Lake Michigan. We ventured out for a walk.
After this long day, we wrapped it up back at the hotel, and settled in for the evening as we had a busy day ahead of us.