Dunes Blog

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They’ve been re-doing the bridge on Calumet in Liberty Township all summer. They worked pretty fast and now it’s all done. That was two weeks ago. The road has been sitting there done, still closed. What gives?

I’m tired of wasting gas taking the annoying detour.

I was never really sold on the idea of the Indiana Dunes Visitor Center. Seemed to me like an incredible waste of money considering that it’s not really by the expressway and cost a ton of money to build. Surely people could rely on the similar money pit that is the Lake County Visitor’s Center. We didn’t really need two visitor center’s doing essentially the same thing.

I was shocked to find that I found it useful.

The wife and I have been enjoying the beginning of the summer by starting to bike ride in Northwest Indiana. We’ve ridden in a few cool places, the Sumer Valley and the Beverly Shores World’s Fair Homes (blog entry on that forthcoming), but we quickly ran out of ideas of places to ride. We needed a way to figure out where all the bike routes and bike paths were.

Generally, I rely on the internet for this sort of information. And the internet came up woefully short in quickly providing this information.

I was in the neighborhood one day and on a whim decided to run by the visitors center to see if they had any information about bike routes in Northwest Indiana. I walked in and was pleasantly surprise of how nice the place was. It was filled with people milling about and there was even a nice gift shop.

As soon as I entered a very helpful woman asked if I need help looking for something. I told her I was looking for a map of bike routes in northern indiana and she led me over to a shelf that had one. Sure enough, I opened the map and it was of the entire region and had a color coded map key of all the bike routes. Best of all, this map was free. It’s also a good map of the area to boot.

Inspired, I browsed all the bookcases and grabbed all the free brochures I could. Never hurts to have that stuff laying around.

The Dunes Visitor Center may have cost more money to build than I’ll ever make in my life, but it’s a nice guide to the fun things to do in Northwest Indiana. So I guess it’s not a complete waste.