I’m going to start out with something completely unrelated to Turkey Run State Park: one of our last weeks in Michigan, we completed an item from my MI summer list. We visited the Tridge! The triple-bridge in Midland didn’t fit in my last post, but I really wanted to share these photos because I think they are so cool!

It was a really fun place to have a wide angle lens, and architecturally it’s probably one of the most interesting footbridges we’ve come across!

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what’s been happening! We made it down to Grand Rapids and camped in the driveway of my brother and his wife. We enjoyed a lovely socially distanced dinner with them, then took off the next morning. Michigan colors in full swing!

We had planned on seeing Kyle’s family in Indiana, but we heard from our friends in Illinois that they were about to leave for Florida for the cruising season. Change of plans! We stopped in Illinois and driveway camped again. It was so great to catch up with them!

Then we backtracked to Indiana. We had our ballots sent there, and we thought they had arrived. Instead, our envelope contained new voter registration cards. Our ballots had just arrived in our Florida mailbox. We extended our visit in order to wait while we had our ballots sent to Indiana, because voting is very important to us!

While we were there, we tried to visit a few breweries in a responsible manner. The first had outdoor seating, and it was COLD but the beer was worth it! That was our only successful stop of the day, the rest of the breweries were full of people and didn’t have adequate options for staying outdoors! It was a bummer, but that’s life in the era of COVID. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Soon it was time to hit the road for real. We headed downstate to Turkey Run State Park, which is a place Kyle visited as a child and had fond memories of. We booked two nights there, since we were supposed to have one really nice warm sunny day, the perfect day for hiking! This was my first experience with Reserve America, and somehow our $23/night campsite ended up costing us $70 for two nights. That’s practically airbnb levels of bloating up with extra fees. I’m sure there’s a learning curve to booking campsites, I’ll have to figure this one out.

When we arrived, the weather was 15 degrees below forecast. Uncomfortably cold! Some hot food and a warmup hike boosted our spirits and got us hyped for exploring!

We woke up to a beautiful sunny day. The forecast was for temps in the high 70s, unseasonably warm! We couldn’t wait to get hiking! Then we got some news: one of the people we’ve recently been in contact with tested positive for COVID. We’ve been quite cautious with everyone we’ve associated with, but when this happens there are all kinds of mental gymnastics involved in trying to assess the real risk of exposure. We opted to continue with our hiking plans, since we’d be outdoors and distanced from other people, then reassess our next moves as we are officially in a quarantine period.

I was wearing a pair of new hiking shoes (since I’d learned my lesson about needing shoes with tread), the list of trails was rated from “easy” to “very rugged,” so I expected we’d avoid the very rugged trails because I was still breaking in my shoes. But no, the only trails we hiked were “very rugged!” It is about a mile hike to the main trail head, where there is a suspension bridge over Sugar Creek.

You probably think of Indiana as flatland and cornfields. Turkey Run State Park is nothing like that. Deep ravines and sandstone canyons are conduits for tiny streams, and the hiking trails follow those streams! We were careful not to get our feet wet, but I can imagine it would be a great place to keep cool in the summer!

We started out at the “ladders” trail, a sandstone canyon that ends in a series of ladders to get up and out of the canyon. The park was actually quite busy (we later learned it was Fall Break so kids weren’t in school), and the ladders were a bottleneck as people carried dogs down the ladders and coaxed toddlers up the ladders. Not the demographics you’d expect (or hope for) on a trail marked “very rugged.”

We continued up the trail of “140 steps,” huffing and puffing for a few minutes at the top of all those stairs, but we recovered quickly. Down towards Boulder Canyon, then through Falls Canyon.

When we completed our loop, we still had energy so we picked out another trail to try out. We didn’t make it too far before it bottlenecked in a tight canyon with a crowd of people, so rather than fight the crowds we decided to turn back. We actually ended up hiking almost all day with our masks on, just to be on the safe side.

With the crowd of people stuck in the canyon, I finally got a tourist-free shot of the beautiful rock formations we had just hiked through.

As we reached the trailhead and started home, all that hiking caught up with me. By the time we got back to the campsite we had completed 7 miles of hiking! It was all so fantastically gorgeous, and we had such perfect weather for it. It seemed like whenever we started to get too hot, we would reach the depths of a cool canyon and feel better.

On the other side of the park was a covered bridge, which I thought would be a fun photo op for the bus. Well…it was not exactly what we expected!

It was still an interesting bridge, but we definitely couldn’t drive the bus through it! We didn’t linger there too long though. One notable thing at our campsite: we’ve owned this bus for 7 years, so there aren’t too many questions we haven’t heard yet. We got a new one here though, and we had multiple people ask us: “Is this actually an old VW bus, or is it one of the new ones made to look vintage?” I have no idea where that came from. New ones? It sounds like a group of campers had a discussion and maybe multiple people came to us to clarify, but there’s no such thing as a new VW bus. Not in the US at least. There are Brazilian models that are newer, but they’re very obvious because they have a big radiator in the front. But that’s pretty obscure VW knowledge. Who knows!

We’re going to try to keep moving, we think we can safely continue on while being under quarantine. Since we’re camping, we can viably keep our distance from people. We’ll watch for symptoms, and we’ll have to avoid being indoors with other people. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many alternatives right now, since we don’t have a home to return to. Rule number one for bus life was always: only if we can do it safely and responsibly during a pandemic. This is raising a lot of questions for us.