August 22 2024 Monroeville to Salamanie State Forest, Indiana











    Monroeville is a great place to stay and it was quiet in the building overnight. It was 48 when we got up. The last two mornings were also cool so Kay has been wearing tights the first half of the day. 

    It was another beautiful day to bike. We traveled through soybean and corn fields and some woods. Saw a huge long pile of what looked like dirt/stone off in the distance and made us think of Gibraltar. It was part of a huge quarry for crushed limestone, sand & gravel. As we crossed the highway next to it and rode past the quarry, we had multiple large dump trucks both coming and going. That one mile section of road was very, very busy, but before and after it was very quiet. Shortly after that, we crossed the St Mary River, which joins with another river to form the Maumee River. 

    Power Poles Stretching into the Distance on a Quiet Road 

    We were puzzled and amused by a small pond we passed in front of a house. Moored in the pond was a sailboat!

 Later on, we crossed the Wabash River, then stopped for a break under a tree in front of a country church building. We had passed a cemetary next to the church and noticed it had a levee around it, which puzzled us as it seemed very high above the river. Jim talked to someone in a pickup truck leaving the cemetary who told him it had flooded 3 times in the past 50 years before the levee was built. 

    When we got to the Salamonie River, the road took us over a huge earthen dam. The dam was built for flood control; in the past 100 years before the dam, about every 20 years there was severe flooding in Peru, Wabash and Logansport as they are on floodplains. The water level behind the dam is high in the summer for recreation, then is drawn down in fall and winter months to be ready to hold water from spring snowmelt and rain.

    Beyond the dam we turned off to go to a campground in the Salamonie State Forest. It seemed pretty empty when we pulled in but then we noticed other people in the lower half of the campground. They seemed to be noisy during the afternoon, but either quieted down or we didn't notice them with a screen of brush around the back and sides of our site. Our site also had a large structure at the back of it, made up of a rim of concrete raised off the ground almost head high on 4 concrete pillars at the corners, with a bit of rerod peeking out of the concrete at the corners. We debated about what it used to be; Kay's guess was the base for a lookout tower for forest fires.

   We made a miscalculation--we didn't realize there weren't any grocery stores on our route today. We've got enough food to eat as we always have a supply, just not quite the food we expected to eat for dinner at the campground tonight.

   After setting up camp, we took a walk on the trails in the Salamonie State Forest among big beautiful trees. There was a ravine that has 3 waterfalls, but they were dry now. We went all the way down to the Salamonie River which looked pretty small as this was below the dam, and then headed back to our campsite. It was a beautiful night with lots of stars.