Dancing Down through War Torn Memories

My sincere apologies for taking so long to get this next post up. It probably would have been another week wait if it had not been for the fact that my baby, Ophelia (that's my Honda CR-V), broke down and we have to wait for her to get fixed. More on that later though, for now let's pick up where we left off.

We left the home at the north of Detroit and booked it down towards Indianapolis. (Whenever we move between cities I feel a little strange because usually we prefer to stick to the forest where we can be filthy without being self-conscious, but every once and a while something comes up that makes two city days in a row happen.) The reason for the rush on this particular day was that down in Indianapolis that night was a blues dance, and I was hungry for some blues. The last time I got a chance to dance was all the way back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and that was much too long ago. Thankfully Tweedy and Eric are understanding of my addiction and are willing to make some concessions for it as long as it doesn’t mess with the path of travel too greatly. Just so happens we needed to get to Indiana.

In Minneapolis I was amazed that the weekly dance was held in conjunction with a weekly blues jam at a local blues bar. Indianapolis was more of what I am used to seeing as far as dance venues go, though the entrance to the location was tucked away rather discreetly. Eric, Tweedy, and I wandered around the building twice before we caught sight of the door that we were supposed to go through (it also happened to be the only door on the building that was still unlocked). After hiking up the two stories of stairs—which admittedly isn’t that great a number of stairs anyway, especially compared to another staircase we would be going up a couple days later—we arrived at a fantastic dance hall. I was going to call it a “little” dance hall, but that would be an inaccurate description. In all honesty it was medium sized, but the lack of attendants made it appear as if it were giant. A feeling that was augmented by having a wall of mirrors directly across from a wall of windows. It felt like infinite dancing space. There were only a total of eleven attendees in this infinite space, and that count includes Eric, Tweedy, and I. Turns out the scene had just sprouted up within the past couple months. Blues dancing is a young dance as far as being steps that are taught—though it’s history is one of the oldest American dance forms. Being a young dance the young people have more of a thing for it, so the people who had started the scene there in Indianapolis had been introduced to blues dancing where they had gone to college in usually much smaller towns. Strangely enough, when they came into the capital of Indiana they could no longer find the blues dancing that they had found in the smaller towns where they had gone to college. In fact no one had even heard of blues before. They decided it was time to take matters into their own hands and started putting these weekly dances together. The scene is definitely still at toddler level, but I had a fantastic time and met some great dancers and people in general. My only complaint was the fact that once again all the dancers were ready to pack up and leave by 11:00 p.m. There are so many more hours that are good for dancing after 11:00! Sure it was a Tuesday, but back in Denver I’m up past 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The good part about the dance ending early is that we were able to do our late night self-guided city tour. I think we have done a tour like that with nearly every single big city we have gone through so far on the trip, and it is always the best possible city tour a person could ever get. In this case we managed to find our way down to a river walk first where we passed by several other late night ramblers enjoying a quiet stroll. So for those taking notes, Indianapolis is yet another large city that any individual can feel perfectly safe wandering down the streets in the middle of the night. Along the river walk were several murals as well as some of the most fantastic little architectural flourishes. I was especially a fan of all of the little bridges crisscrossing the river.

As we reached the end of the river walk we started in towards the center of downtown. On our way we passed what has to be the friendliest police officer I have ever met in my entire life. He was a young guy, probably younger than me, but his youth did not show in the least. He gave us a short history lesson on Indianapolis and Indiana in general and told us that there were two FREE museums in the city that were attached to monuments. The monuments we could see still during that night, but the museums we would have to come back for. Not like we minded retracing our steps—anything free is worth doing some backtracking for. Still we went to check out the monuments by the illumination of the city lights. These monuments were the Indianapolis Civil War Monument/Museum

And the Indianapolis War Monument/Museum.

More information about these later. During our ramblings we bumped into a group of well-dressed young individuals sitting on the steps of the Civil War Monument. Turns out they were students at a local Christian university who were there in downtown for a conference of some sort. Indianapolis may not be as busy as bigger cities late at night, but it doesn’t seem to fall asleep entirely either. It just gets a heavy drowsiness. The drowsiness was starting to hit us as well and we still had several miles to go to reach Tweedy’s grandpa, who had offered a place to stay for the night. Thankfully so too, there was a chance of rain that night and rain is our one foe when it comes to tent camping.

Once again, it was late—I would say 2 o’clock in the morning—when we showed up on Tweedy’s grandpa’s doorstep. Thankfully we had given him a significant forewarning that we would be showing up during the young hours of the morning, still I felt a little guilty, not enough though that I would have given up my little night of dancing. He offered us a little bite of food before we descended to the basement where there were actual beds waiting to carry us off into the land of dreams.

The next day we woke up late. So late that I would consider myself a fiend if I were to refer to it as morning. This meant that it was already past the time for breakfast and we were beginning to encroach on lunchtime. Tweedy’s grandpa was kind enough to take us out for our late breakfast/lunch at a local Chinese buffet. Seeing as we had skipped about two meals before that buffet we were able to get the full money’s worth. I think I filled four plates worth, plus two or three other small plates to cleanse the pallet. We rolled out of that restaurant, had a little trouble fitting through the front door, but nothing that a little butter and some elbow grease from the wait staff couldn’t fix.

Tweedy’s father continued to spoil us by giving us a tour of Madison, Indiana (the town where he lived and where we were staying) after the lunch. We got to cross south to Kentucky even and even went into Clifty State Park where we saw a couple of waterfalls. Unfortunately I did not have my camera on me for that little excursion, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was beautiful.

Once we got back to home base Tweedy’s grandfather headed out to take care of his responsibilities as a minister and we walked down the street to a set of old railroad tracks that we began to walk up and along. Eventually we stumbled upon a set of seemingly random old concrete stairs that just ended abruptly just before the ravine that was to the side of the railroad tracks. What would you do if you randomly stumbled across cement stairs in a location where they had no right being? You have to follow them, right? That’s what we thought, and follow them we did. Ultimately they popped up at the edge of a road that ran in front of a hospital. It seemed like such a strange location for a hospital, so we decided that we better case the joint and figure out if there was a big residential development just behind it that would legitimize the hospital’s location, but instead of finding a residential community we found a different sort of community—a women’s prison was just sitting there, pretty much sharing property with the hospital. Things quickly grew awkward at this point as we just continued to walk right on by the prison. It must have been meal time or something because once we were almost past it all the sudden all of the “tenants” came pouring out of the buildings. We just continued to walk, but our presence drew some attention that eventually led to a random warden yelling at us to just keep moving. Strangely enough she yelled that while we were in the process of walking.

Eventually we completed the loop around the campus and descended the cement stairs/dirt trail in the dark and stayed another night with Tweedy’s grandpa. We couldn’t stay there forever though, so the next day we had to leave those wonderful loving people and return to Indianapolis for the FREE war museums.

First stop in Indianapolis was the Salvation Army where we parked our cars before hiking into downtown. The Civil War Museum was a fairly small set-up (especially now that I can consider it in comparison to the Civil War Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania), but it was free, and provided a bit of educational review, plus we were able to walk up a giant winding staircase to the top of the Civil War Monument, which was pretty cool as well as being a great workout for the thighs. The museum really worth talking about though is the Indianapolis War Museum. This museum was constructed after World War I with the resources and money from all of the countries involved in the signing of the treaty. Why Indianapolis, Indiana of all places? You might ask. Well it turns out that Indiana has always had the greatest percentage of volunteers for all of the wars in the history of the US that Indiana was around for. In recognition of the sacrifice made by this state it was the one that got to have the multi-million-dollar monument and museum to The War that was supposed to have been the end of all wars. Unfortunately, that was not the case as the museum inside it can attest to. It chronicles the involvement of the US in all of the wars that it has ever been involved in, including the Revolutionary War on through the “War on Terror.” It is quite the monument though. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

After completing our tour of the museums we decided that we were satisfied with our time in Indiana and that it was time to move on once again. Ohio was a-calling.