Indiana Dunes National Park

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Indiana Dunes National Park

Indiana Dunes National Park is located near the southern tip of Lake Michigan, covering 15-miles of Lake Michigan shoreline and comprised of over 15,000 acres of dunes, oak savannas, swamps, bogs, marshes, prairies, rivers, and forests. Originally authorized as the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966, a name change to the Indiana Dunes National Park was approved by Congress in 2019, making it the 61st national park.

We visited the Indiana Dunes National Park in late May 2025 while staying at the Thousand Trails Bear Cave RV Campground in Buchanan, Michigan about an hour away. We started our visit at the Visitor Center and watched a short movie that highlighted the biological diversity within the park. Over 1,100 flowering plant species and ferns make their homes in the park. The wildlife is also diverse. The park is renowned for its bird life; more than 350 species have been observed here. The park is an especially important feeding and resting area for migrating land and water birds.

From this Visitor Center we headed to the Dune Ridge Trail parking lot. Before taking the 0.7 mile loop trail, we walked the short distance along the road to Kemil Beach on the shore of Lake Michigan. Waves were breaking on the sandy beach, and the vast lake seemed just like an ocean shoreline. From the shoreline we could see the skyscrapers of the distant Chicago skyline across the lake to the northwest.

The Dune Ridge trail headed south from the trailhead parking lot through sandy dunes which quickly transitioned into a dense oak savanna. The loop trail led us to the top of the dune with sweeping views of the Great Marsh. One of the Park Rangers had recommended this trail to see the many diverse habitats in a short trail. It certainly did not disappoint, and we used our Seek App to identify many of the plants and trees along the trail.

From the Dune Ridge Trail we drove along East Lake Front Drive through the resort community of Beverly Shores. Along the way we passed the five historic homes from the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair. The homes were built to demonstrate modern architectural design, experimental materials, and new technologies such as central air conditioning and dishwashers. The buildings were moved by barge and truck to Beverly Shores after the fair. Today the houses are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and have been leased by the non-profit organization Indiana Landmarks. Through this organization, private individuals or families have subleased the homes and are rehabilitating them.

We spent an interesting few hours at the Indiana Dunes National Park and were surprised by the biological and ecological diversity so close to the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Had we stayed longer in the area we would have returned to experience some of the other areas of the park and the more than 50 miles of hiking trails.

Photos from our visit to the park are provided below. Click on the thumbnails for the photo links.

National Corvette Museum

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National Corvette Museum

We visited the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky while staying at the nearby Thousand Trails Diamond Caverns RV & Golf Resort in early May 2025. Bowling Green is the home of the Chevrolet Corvette with the manufacturing plant located nearby the museum.

The museum traces the evolution of the Corvette – Americas Sports Car – from its origins in 1953, through its eight major model updates (C1 through C8) to today’s spectacular mid-rear-engine iteration. The museum includes many corvettes from each generation and also several prototype and concept versions that showed design ideas over the years that may or may not have made it into production.
We particularly liked the classic 1963 split-window Corvette stingray, the only year with the split rear window design; the 1968 Jim Lovell Corvette that was an example of the Corvettes that were driven by many NASA astronauts during the 1960’s space race; and the 1962 Gulf Oil racing Corvette that dominated US sports car racing in 1962, winning 12 of the 14 races it entered.

In 2014 a section of the floor of the Skydome display hall collapsed into a massive sinkhole, taking 8 cars with it. The cars, ranging from unique prototypes to iconic classics, were recovered in a dramatic effort, with some restored to their former glory while others remain in their damaged state as a testament to the event. We saw one of the “unrepaired” sinkhole cars on display in the museum.

After we toured the museum, we visited the Stingray Grill restaurant attached to the museum for lunch. The museum had an excellent choice of food with some very nice vegetarian options included.

A selection of photos from our visit are provided below.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park

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Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park

Above the entrance to the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial Building are carved these words.

“Here over the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born destined to preserve the Union and to free the slave. A grateful people have dedicated this memorial to unity, peace, and brotherhood among these States with malice toward none with charity for all.”

We visited the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park in rural Central Kentucky in May 2025 while staying at the Thousand Trails Diamond Caverns RV & Golf Resort about 45-minutes away in Park City, Kentucky. The memorial building, completed in 1911 was largely funded by citizen donations, and was built to honor the humble beginnings of the Nation’s 16th president. The memorial building houses a cabin, symbolic of Lincoln’s birth home. It was constructed 11 years before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and is referred to by the National Park Service as “The First Lincoln Memorial”.


Alongside the 56 steps that ascend to the memorial building, with each step representing one year of Lincolns life, we visited the Sinking Spring – a land feature that the Lincoln family would have used as their water source, and for which the original farm site was named.

From the Lincoln birthplace site, we drove about 10-miles to Lincoln’s boyhood home where the Lincoln family lived on 30 acres of the 228 acre Knob Creek Farm from the time Abraham was two and a half until he was almost eight years old. This site features hiking trails, a visitor center housed in a 1930 Inn building, as well as a log cabin reconstructed from period materials and representative of Lincoln’s boyhood home.

Photos from our visit to these sites are provided below.

Mammoth Cave National Park

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Mammoth Cave National Park

Geologists estimate that the oldest part of Mammoth Cave began forming around 10 million years ago. To date, explorers have surveyed and mapped more than 426 miles of cave passage, making Mammoth Cave by far the longest known cave system in the world, with explorers still discovering new passages. Over the course of several million years, underground rivers and streams carved out the underlying limestone creating a vast network of underground passageways.
We visited Mammoth Cave National Park in May 2025 while staying at the nearby Thousand Trails Diamond Caverns RV & Golf Resort near Park City, Kentucky. The Mammoth Cave Railroad Bike and Hike Trail ran alongside our RV park, and we were able to e-bike the 7 miles to Mammoth Cave National Park along this pleasant trail. The entire trail runs 9 miles between Mammoth Cave and Park City.

Mammoth Cave is so huge that the Park offers a total of 10 different cave tours, with at least one scheduled time daily for each tour. Reservations are required for the tours, and the NPS website advises that they often fill up a long way in advance. While most of the tours are guided by a Ranger, we chose to take the only self-guided tour known as the “Extended Discovery Tour”. This tour is available from 10 am to 2:30 pm each day and we were able to get same day walk-up reservations and immediate entry on the Sunday we visited. This tour took us a couple of hours including the hilly walk down to the entrance of the cave from the visitor center. This 1-mile tour covers a Y-shaped section of the cave with some very large passages.  The entry passage ended at a natural “Rotunda” with a historic salt peter mining site.
Saltpetre is a principal ingredient in black gunpowder, and mining saltpetre from the cave was extremely profitable in the early 1800’s and became even more so with the start of the War of 1812. Demand for gunpowder was at an all-time high during the war, as the importation of gunpowder had become very difficult due to the British blockade of many eastern sea ports. The War of 1812 ended in 1815, and the demand for saltpetre fell dramatically. Eventually the mining operation stopped, leaving behind mine workings that can still be seen at the Rotunda.

Huge open passages headed in both directions from the Rotunda. The scale of the cave passages was quite amazing, and the natural “flat roof” of the cave very impressive in its span. Rangers were stationed along the route and answered some of our questions about the cave’s history and its formation. We were struck by the lack of “cave decorations” (stalactites, stalagmites, etc.) in Mammoth Cave, which was quite a contrast from Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico that we had visited a month earlier. While Mammoth Cave was formed by underground rivers, it is now largely a “dry cave” with its sandstone cave roof preventing water penetration into the cave. Without any water penetration there is no mechanism for the formation of cave decorations which rely on eons of mineral-rich water dripping into the cave through the roof.

We enjoyed our half day visit and were impressed by the spectacular scale of the caves. The self-guided tour we took seemed like a good introduction to the cave system. A multiday visit to the park would be required to take some of the many Ranger-led cave tours that are available.

Photos from our visit to Mammoth Cave National Park are included at the end of this post.

Shiloh National Military Park

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Shiloh National Military Park

This is the site of one of the most epic struggle in the Western Theater of the Civil War. Nearly 110,000 American troops clashed in a bloody contest that resulted in 23,746 casualties; more casualties than in all of America’s previous wars combined. Located within the boundaries of Shiloh Battlefield is also a United States National Cemetery, which contains around 4,000 soldiers and their family members.

Congress established Shiloh National Military Park on December 27, 1894, to commemorate the April 6-7, 1862, battle that raged around Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing along the Tennessee River. Producing more than 23,000 casualties, the battle was the largest engagement in the Mississippi Valley campaign during the Civil War.


We visited the Shiloh National Military Park in Southern Tennessee in early May 2025 while staying at the Thousand Trails Natchez Trace RV Park in Hohenwald, Tennessee, about a 75-minute drive away. We started our visit at the Visitor Center which told the story of the battle through a variety of media including audio readings of survivor’s memoirs, maps and informational displays, and a video. The battle is named for the Shiloh Meeting House church around which the battle unfolded. A recreation of the Shiloh Meeting House sits on the original church site within the park.

We took the 12.7 mile auto tour route from the Visitor Center, which featured 22 tour stops at such famous places as the Peach Orchard, the Hornet’s Nest, and the Albert Sidney Johnston death site. Informational plaques were posted at each of the stops. An audio tour was also available on the NPS website.

The battle lasted for two days, April 6th and 7th, 1862. During the first day of fighting, Confederate forces made considerable gains, pushing the Union forces back towards Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. The Confederate forces planned to complete a defeat of the Union forces the following day, however Union forces were reinforced early the next morning and conducted an unexpected counter attack, which reversed the Confederate gains of the previous day. The exhausted Confederate army withdrew further south, and a modest Union pursuit started and ended on the second day with a Union victory.

It was interesting to see the spot where the battle started early on the morning of April 6th when a Union scouting party came across Confederate troops at Fraley Field. Along the tour, and within the battlefield in general there are many monuments and monuments, memorials, and troop position markers. Many of the park’s 156 commemorative monuments, 600 troop position markers, and more than 220 cannon were visible from park roads during the auto tour. Some of them could only be reached by hiking into the surrounding woods and fields. We found the section of cannons at “Ruggles Battery” particularly interesting. During the battle more than 50 Confederate cannons formed a 1/2-mile long frontage that was the largest concentration of field guns deployed on a North American battlefield at that time. The auto tour ended at the Shiloh National Cemetery which contains around 4,000 soldiers and their family members. A plaque with the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the entrance of the cemetery served as a reminder of the background and significance of the Civil War.

The Shiloh National Military Park was a historically interesting and though-provoking place to visit. We learned a lot and enjoyed touring the now-serene green meadows and woods that mark the site of one of the most significant battles of the Civil War.

Photos from our visit are posted below.

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