American Discovery Trail: Marion, Indiana

National Bank building in Marion, Indiana

Trump champions a racist, thoroughly stupid and evidence-free conspiracy that says Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Republicans: This is great!

Trump cheats on all his wives, has sex with a porn star and pays her to keep quiet, sexually assaults E. Jean Carroll, and has 20+ women accuse him of inappropriate behavior.

Republicans: No problem.

Trump lies 30,000 times in office, thousands more times before he took office, thousands of times after.

Republicans: Don't care.

Trump tries to extort Ukraine into opening a bogus "investigation" into Biden in order to influence the election.

Republicans: No big deal.

Trump is convicted of 34 felonies, has many more serious indictments in the queue.

Republicans: Whatever.

Trump steals hundreds of classified documents, refuses to return them, and hides them from the FBI.

Republicans: LALALALALA don't want to know.

Trump openly supports Russian priorities and attacks NATO.

Republicans: We love Russia too!

Trump tries to set aside the rightful US government and appoint himself president despite losing the election, quite possibly the worst crime ever committed by any American.

Republicans: He's still our guy.

Trump shoots someone in the middle of Times Square.

Republicans: Oh well, he's done a lot worse.

Biden looks old and confused in a debate after four years as a very good president.

Democrats: The end times are here! He has to go!

I made it through the first Indiana segment of my trip, segment 21 of 68, more than 1,200 miles from the start of the trip, and, finally, just past one-quarter of the way to Point Reyes and the Pacific Ocean. Already we are one-third of the way through Indiana, which seems very quick after Ohio.

June was a good walking month, with 10,500 steps per day. I have now been on the trail one year, and my average steps per day are 10,700, although I only counted steps 251 days out of the 366 since I started last July 1. Assuming I miss about 50 days per year going forward, I have another two and a half years to go.

Overall, this is still fun. I enjoy making progress, and the writing keeps me on track and holds me accountable.

Ireland pictures:

At the Jameson Distillery. We tasted whiskeys and took some home with us, although only for Jackie. I will taste the stuff, but I don't ever choose to drink it.

This is the best Ireland picture, taken by some kind soul at the Cliffs of Moher. It is the background picture on my computer now, replacing Sean Bean dressed as Brandon Stark, telling us that winter is coming, for the last several years. It was time for a change.

American Discovery Trail: Muncie, Indiana

Our first Indiana segment goes from Richmond, Indiana, at the Ohio border, to Muncie, to Marion. We have passed Muncie by now and are about thirty miles from Marion, which is probably just out of reach for this week.

The sculpture here is at the Minnetrista Museum and Gardens in Muncie, Indiana. It is called the Catalyst, as far as I can tell. If I were in Muncie, I would go see it.

I was in Oregon this weekend (had a good tournament, now have 99.17 master points, so very close to my next milestone of 100), so it's good to be back to walking. Arlo was happy to see me and happy to go for a walk with me, so all is back to normal.

From our Ireland Trip. This is a Titanic Memorial, so probably in Belfast, which is a big shipbuilding location even today.

I vaguely remember this place - very old ruins of a church and village. In Ireland, "very old" can mean more than 1,000 years, sometimes more than 1,500 years, although I do not remember the precise age of this place. There is an ancient cemetery next to the tower. 
 

American Discovery Trail: Indiana Farmlands

Me: My knee hurts.

Doctor: It's probably arthritis.

Me: Just what is arthritis?

Doctor: It means your knee hurts.

We did not actually have that conversation, but work in the word "inflammation," and it is pretty close. You're getting older. Your body is wearing down.

Still, my knee is functional enough that I can keep walking for now. Also, I had an MRI of a spot on my liver that turned out to be a hemangioma, which is a type of benign tumor. Also, my A1C (blood sugar) was better than last time. I am good to go for a while.

Indiana is one of a few states along the American Discovery Trail that features long segments with minimal descriptions of places you are passing. Descriptions were written by representatives of each state, and you can tell that they took very different approaches. In Ohio, for example, there were things to see every ten or 15 miles, but in Indiana, the descriptions are more about the different trail systems that are incorporated into the ADT and that you will be walking on.

That is a long way of saying that I am going to be posting pictures of Ireland while I am walking through Indiana. The ADT site does say that this is flat land dominated by large grain farms, so you can visualize cornfields if you like. Next week I should have at least one actual picture of Indiana though.

This top picture is the Peace Bridge, a pedestrian bridge in Derry, or Londonderry if you prefer (it is called both) over the River Foyle in Northern Ireland. I walked across it and back - it is only 771 feet long.

Some fine person must have taken this second photo for us. I look huge. I have lost some weight.

This is at the Giant's Causeway, an area with mostly hexagonal naturally occurring stones, thousands of them. This picture is just a sampling. It is a very striking place in the north of Ireland. Legend has it that an Irish giant built a path with these stones across to Scotland to fight a Scottish giant, and although the causeway was destroyed by the giants, there are still matching stone columns at an island on the Scottish side of the sea.

The walking is going well. I am near Muncie, Indiana, about 35 miles into the state, headed for Marion and beyond.

 

American Discovery Trail: Finally, Indiana

With a bit of a push these last two days, I finally made it to the Indiana border. I spent four months and walked 522 miles in Ohio. It will take me less than that to get across both Indiana and Illinois, as the trail apparently doesn't wander around so much for the next two states.

I have now finished twenty segments of the trail, and tomorrow I will hit 2.5 million steps. That is less than one quarter of the way to the end, but by the end of June, I should be about a quarter of the way. This last year was not the most productive because of my long vacations last summer and fall, so as I approach a year on the trail, I expect to make better progress in future years.

When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash

Then I long for my Indiana home.

From "Back Home Again in Indiana."

The Indy 500 race is held every year on the Sunday before Memorial Day, and they sing that song before the race each year, the way that they sing the national anthem before other sporting events. Mom always wanted to turn on coverage of the race in time to hear the song, which was performed by Jim Nabors most years between 1972 and 2014.

 I used Google street view to get this picture, which is probably the house where my grandparents lived and my mom grew up. The picture makes it hard to tell, but it is in the right place, so probably that is it. Until I was eight and we moved to California, I think I spent more time in Indiana than any state besides Ohio, and this is where I spent most of that time. I barely remember anything else about the state.

As I recall, we would spend a week with my mother's parents each year. They lived in a place called Swalls Indiana, just outside of Terre Haute. Swalls was my mother's maiden name, and the community was named for her family. Swalls and Terre Haute are on the far west side of Indiana, and Akron is on the east side of Ohio, so we drove almost all the way across both states to get there.

I remember collecting eggs from the chickens; playing in the barn, the corn cribs, and the corn fields; and sitting on a big screened-in porch. There was a store at the intersection of two highways, walking distance from the house. If we travelled around Indiana at all, I do not remember that.

If we were to walk straight west across the state, we would come close to Swalls, Indiana, but we will not go that way. The trail takes us northwest, from southern Ohio to the far northwest corner of Indiana, near Chicago and Lake Michigan. The trail covers exactly 250 miles, and it will take about two months to get to Illinois.

 

American Discovery Trail: The Last Ohio Sights

Miami University

We are partway through the last leg of the trail in Ohio, near Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University. We are a few miles east of the Indiana border and 25 miles north of our last post from Elizabethtown.

In a good week, I can walk about 35 miles, and Indiana is 33.5 miles ahead, so I will challenge myself to get there this week, if for no other reason than that I am tired of typing "Ohio."

I posted on May 12 that my walking for May to that point had not been up to par, but I am happy to say that by the end of the month, I had brought my average steps per day back over 10,000, as it should be. For the whole trip, 226 walking days now, I am averaging 10,700 steps per day. At that rate, it should take me right around 1,000 days of walking to complete the trip.

The Harshman Covered Bridge. It is actually a few miles down the road still, but it should be the last Ohio picture except one that says "Leaving Ohio."