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.