Indiana and Illinois

We said goodbye to Kentucky while it was still hot and humid, and drove to Indianapolis, Indiana- where it was hot and humid!

Here is the Indianapolis skyline:

We went to the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, but even though we arrived 1.5 hours before closing, it was closed! so we did not get a chance to see the home of the 23rd President, the only president from Indiana. We did drive past Monument Circle:

And Lucas Oil Stadium:

And saw a funky art buffalo:

But the highlight of the day was a trip to The Brickyard-

yep the Indianapolis Motor Speedway- WOW! This place is huge, and we recommend visiting if you are in the area! The museum was very cool, with lots of information, exhibits, and winning cars from a variety of years:

And here are the winning cars from 1912 and from 2016- a little bit of a difference between them:

We took the Kiss the Bricks tour, which takes you on a lap around the track, with a stop at the start/finish line, and you can see some of the original bricks.

The rest are there, but they are covered by asphalt. We took a pic at the start/finish line, underneath the flag stand:

The stand is a replica of the crow’s nest from the USS Indianapolis, which delivered the atomic bombs used by the Enola Gay.

Here’s the view coming out of turn 4- this may give some perspective of how big this place is:

I took a picture of a picture of Indy that was in the gift shop:

The guide said that you could fit all of the football stadiums from last year’s Big10 Conference inside the Speedway- that’s 14 football stadiums! Indy 500 is known as the largest single-day sporting event because there are over 250,000 permanent seats- and they added seats this year so that there were 400,000 spectators! TV does not do it justice.

Anyway, visiting the Brickyard was fun- take the tour because it was super interesting and the 2 guides really knew their stuff!

The next day we drove to Galesburg, Illinois-

just the half-way point to our next stop, Ames, Iowa, so we are just spending one night- no time to play.

We did get some rain and see some wildflowers on the side of the road, though:

Tomorrow we will go to Ames, where we get to visit our oldest- woohoo!!!