Clifty Falls State Park

Indiana's State Park Inns have discounted rates Sunday through Thursday in the winter. This works out great for us since we don't have kids with school schedules that keep us from taking some time off in February.

We like staying in the inns, but there must be a town close by. There also has to be a fridge in the room. The reason for this is that we are not home cooking, meat and potatoes people. Even before I became a vegetarian, I wanted no part of fried chicken, meatloaf, or green beans with bacon. Since this is precisely the sort of food our state park inns think we want to eat, we do not want eat in the inn very often at all. This time, we had breakfast there once. (Pancake edges should not be crunchy. That's all I'm saying.) The rest of the time, we either ate out in a nearby town or ate food from a Trader Joe's spree I did before we left.*

We went to Clifty Falls State Park.

Our first full day, the weather was beautiful. We took a long hike.

The sky looked like this:

There were signs that Spring is coming:

We did parts of several trails that day. One of them took us across the creek. Neither of us fell in. I deem that a success.

There are four named waterfalls in the park: Big Clifty, Little Clifty (startlingly creative, I know), Tunnel, and Hoffman. We visited all four. I have no idea which one this is, but here's one of them:

The next day was cold and rainy, so we walked around historic Madison, a nearby town. My friend Holly had talked about a couple of shops when she visited recently (here), and we made sure to hit those places as well as whatever else attracted our interest.

The next day was cold, but it was so cold that what precipitation there was was primarily frozen. We decided it was fine to walk in. The trails were going to be very muddy after the rain the day before, so we walked as much as we could on the roads and went off on the trails at strategic points to see what we wanted to see.

It was also the day we found this:

There are over 150 steps there. I come from a part of the state that has been squished flat by glaciers; I am not used to this many steps. I felt really out of shape when I finally made it to the top.

We had recovered from the steps enough that we decided to visit the observation tower that looks out over the Ohio River when we came upon it.

It gave us a view like this:

When we weren't walking or eating, we played a computer game together and I knit. We have developed a comfortable routine of playing adventure games together. Andrew operates the laptop, and I knit. He is much more persistent than I am, so he often wants to spend more time figuring out puzzles than I do. (I have no problem cheating by looking up the answer online. This is a game. It's supposed to be fun. When it stops being fun, I stop caring about it.) I have found that if I'm knitting, I don't care if he's spending fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to unlock a secret door in the castle.

It was a short, quiet vacation and really, really lovely. I was reminded how lucky I am to have this life with Andrew. He is my favorite person, and I can't imagine what sort of karma allowed us to find one another. I bow to the ground in gratitude.


*By the way, Trader Joe's doughnut holes are delicious, and I don't usually enjoy doughnut holes. You should try them.