US50 Phase 1: Nashville

Oct 7 Nashville and area

 

 

That's Nashville Indiana, not the one in Tennessee known for music and also by truckers for the high number of wrecks during rush hour.

 

Traveled around the area today. Looked at a cool sounding property of 30 acres surrounded on three sides by the Yellowwood State Forest but . . . the roads were a bit challenging as they traversed the hills-n-hollows and the house itself was right up on the road because the property falls sharply away from there and it would be difficult to build on anywhere else.

 

After another disappointing ‘new home base’ elimination, I went down to check out nearby Lake Lemon. This seemed like a pretty little lake with a fair amount of unspoiled shoreline, though I could only find one public boat launch tucked into the upper end of the lake and it looked pretty crowded on this fall weekend.

 

From there I swung on over to the town of Bloomington, home of the flagship campus (Their words not mine.) of the Indiana University. I prowled around a bit and decided this is a decent little college town that seems, from the road construction, to be growing.

 

But enough of that! Leaving Bloomington I looped around and went to the Brown County State Park just south of Nashville. This is a large park and I had to make sure I used the west entrance as the east entrance, 15 miles away and near where I am camped, crosses a covered bridge with 9’ of vertical clearance, 8” less than what I need. Quaint but inconvenient! Once I got into the park I grabbed a snack for lunch and spent the rest of the daylight hiking a few of the very nice trails.

The idea for making this side trip to Nashville was to check out this supposedly great place to live, but, in addition to the challenge of driving the hills-n-hollows roads of the area every day, including during winter, turns out Nashville is very much a tourist destination (If all the cars and people on foot didn’t let you know that the $4 parking in town should your first clue) and you clearly want to stay clear of here on the weekends. (Of course, in keeping with the theme of this trip, I managed to hit there right on a weekend!) That said, the state park was not too much of a zoo and has plenty of nice trails. I couldn’t help think that would be nice to live nearby and be able to run over there once or twice a week to get a nice hike in.