oh yeah... that's a cooling tower back there.

Damn Indiana, you look good! I'm sorry if this is a rash generalization but from what I had seen of the rest of small-town America I was expecting the Chesterton, IN locals to be on the chunky-i-shop-at-sam's-club side but I was dead wrong. The residents of the Indiana Dunes area are healthy and active and they look like it! I can understand why, there are loads of great outdoor activities here that the locals take advantage of. There are endless steep dunes to scramble up and down (really, it's fun) and the scenic Calumet bike trail goes all up and down the lakeshore.
Also, I was not expecting that everyone would be so nice in Indiana, but again I was wrong! The towns surrounding this National Park seem somewhat economically depressed, but that hasn't taken a toll on the morale of the residents at all. Everyone that I've encountered from the gas station to the post office has been overtly friendly. Even when I went into the Ranger's Station and acted like a total spazz (first I couldn't open the door, then I tripped into the door, then I couldn't close the door when I was leaving), the people who worked there were nice and efficient and didn't even laugh at me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not moving here or anything. The beach at Lake Michigan is NOT like the real beach, sorry non-coastal people but it's just not, and the number of factories and refineries that are on the shore here kind of gross me out. When you're standing on the lakeshore here you've got smokestacks on either side of you, and I have to imagine that some sort of ickiness is making its way into the water. Yeah and the beach here is not like an ocean beach: there are no waves and therefore no surfing, no one really goes swimming, it's not very warm here, there's no boardwalk, it's just not the same. And by not the same I mean not as good. However, it was pretty nice this morning when I went to the main beach of the lakshore and no one else was there so I could do yoga and meditate and scramble up the dunes and stuff and not feel self-conscious. The unpopularity of the inferior beach played in my favor that way.
As far as other thoughts in my head, I've started to scold myself (silently, don't worry) when I leave my car without any ID or a cellphone or anything. I think to myself, "What will happen if something happens to your car? What will happen if something happens to you? How will anyone know who you are? You're nobody, you're just a girl with a spork in her hand." This happened about an hour ago when I went to go wash my spork. So the moral of the story is: if you read in the paper about a dead or injured girl with no means of identification save the purple spork in her hand, it's me!

11:28 AM;

Like a drifter i was born to walk alone...