My Travel Memories: Union Station, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1991

Thomas and I would be coming up on our 30th wedding anniversary in November. We got married soon after our college graduations and I had gotten my first full-time job, as a file clerk at a law firm in January 1991, so by November, I’d earned six months of vacation time.

Thomas didn’t get his first job until September of 1991, so he didn’t have any vacation time coming. As a result, we took a four-day mini-honeymoon. My boss paid for two nights at the Drake Hotel in Chicago and then we went to Indianapolis for Monday and Tuesday and were back at work on Wednesday.

The first night we were in Indianapolis, we went downtown and found Union Station.

I love train station architecture. My first favorite was the Van Buren Street Station in Chicago, which I could tell had been lovely at one point, but was pretty run-down in the 1990s. I was also very taken by Chicago’s Union Station when I took a train to Milwaukee in the late 1980s.

Actually, no. My first favorite was Union Station Cincinnati, which I’ve written about before. Not that it matters. Back to Indianapolis.

Wikimedia says that this image is in the public domain. I don’t know when it was taken, but it’s before the streets of Indianapolis were paved. If this is not in the public domain, please let me know and I’ll replace it with a more modern photo that has been released into the public domain by the photographer.

Thomas and I went downtown and walked around a bit. We found the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and, eventually, Union Station. At the time, Union Station had a bunch of little mom-and-pop shops and I’ve always enjoyed what we referred to in our family as “malling,” which is kind of like window-shopping but in a mall. Usually, malling involves the purchase of an item, frequently food, in order to pay for the visit.

So, we malled for a bit and purchased an assortment of Jelly Belly jellybeans (possibly germane Amazon link?), including, if I recall correctly, jalapeño and buttered popcorn. They did, in fact, taste just like jalapeño and buttered popcorn, which was really disconcerting, since the texture was just . . . wrong.

There is a possibility that somewhere in my collection of belongings, I still have the Union Station t-shirt I bought that day.

My Gratuitous Amazon Links are going to stray from the Avatar the Last Airbender books after this one, because the “omnibus editions,” which have the whole story, for the next two storylines aren’t out yet. I didn’t realize that the book for Shadow and Stone wasn’t coming out until October 5 until I’d put the post together, so there’s a post on photography coming out on October 5.

For today, though, we have Suki, Alone, which is a standalone story about Suki’s time in the Boiling Rock prison. There are two more standalone stories out now, which will come up as Gratuitous Amazon Links once I’ve been able to read them.

My Travel Memories: Battle Ground, Indiana

I think.

On our way back to Chicago from Ohio, we went through Tippecanoe County, Indiana. The site of the battle of Tippecanoe.

We didn’t go for any kind of white supremacist reasons or anything. After all, the Battle of Tippecanoe was the United States Army versus the Native Americans. So, yeah. There’s that.

We went there because just to the north of the battlefield was an old Methodist church camp where my mom used to go to camp. The camp had, at that point, been sitting empty since sometime in the late 1960s. My mom wanted to take some pictures of the buildings there while they were still standing.

My mom’s picture of the chapel (just like it says on the tin) at the old church camp, 1987

So that brings my memories of our 1987 trip to an end. Up next: 1988 –New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore!

My Travel Memories — I Honestly Think that 1987 Comes Next

This will be kind of a short post, just to fill in the missing five years here.

I honestly thought that we went to EPCOT in 1982, but we were in Florida in July and EPCOT didn’t open until October.  Though that might explain why I have a memory of Spaceship Earth, which is the big golf-ball-looking structure, still under construction. We probably went to The Magic Kingdom and saw Spaceship Earth from a distance.

I wish I could find our photo albums from these years.

Since I don’t think we went anywhere in 1983, 1984, 1985, or 1986 (though I would be thrilled to be proven wrong), I guess that next up was our family trip to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio in 1987. We returned to some of our haunts from our 1980 trip and added a few more.

I do have photographs from this trip, mostly taken by my mom, so I will be adding them as appropriate once I start making those posts in another six days or so.

You will also see the first 400 words that I had already written on EPCOT in another couple of months, once I get to 1989.