After beautiful Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, we had grand plans for a Taliesin Tour- a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park, IL home and then to Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wi.  To break up our drive and to enjoy some more of Lake Michigan and the sandy dunes, we stopped for a night at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

This park area was unique to us in a number of ways.  First of all, there is an Indiana Dunes State Park in addition to the National Lakeshore.  We hear that the nicer parts of the area (and the 3 dunes challenge) are actually inside the state park, but we weren’t there long enough to explore the state park, too.  A bit more unusual for us was that unlike many of the other parks we have been to, Indiana Dunes isn’t far from civilization.  Dunewood Campground, where we resided for a night, was around the block from some local homes, and big box stores were all around (we got our Chipotle fix in one day! lol)  It’s only about an hour from Chicago as well.

One of the coolest things we saw in Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was a collection of homes from the Century of Progress Exhibit at the 1933 World’s Fair.  My understanding is that the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago gathered architects to re-imagine what the future of America’s housing would look like, from materials to technology.  Five of the houses have either been preserved or are in the process of being restored in the park along the shores of Lake Michigan.  The most interesting house of the bunch is unfortunately not yet fully restored, but there were pictures of what it looked like in its heyday.  It was named the “House of Tomorrow“, was very round, had lots of windows, and contained a small airplane hanger (in addition to the garage) since naturally, in the future everyone would be traveling by small plane.

One of the last highlights (or maybe lowlights) of our short time in Indiana was discovering that we were not alone for our ride to the Indiana Dunes.  Perhaps we got too careless housing our food in our car or perhaps we left the doors open one too many times while cooking… When we discovered that someone besides us had been eating our potato chips, we went into panic mode!  We named our visitor (who we never saw but who clearly left his tracks known) the Michigan Mouse, and we deposited him in the Indiana Dunes.  We spent an almost 3 hours at an Indiana self-serve car wash, where we unloaded the entire car onto a tarp, vacuumed every nook and cranny, and went to town disinfecting.  Hopefully our little friend enjoys his new home in Indiana more than our car.