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The Mescher Family Vacation to Turkey Run State Park near Crawfordsville, IN - July 22-26, 2002

Here we are having lunch in the middle of our first day's hike.

This is a portion of our second day's hiking.  The pic on the left is an old church hidden in the woods on top of a ridge.  The rest just show the lovely forest scenery.  :)

Many of the trails at Turkey Run are on the rugged side.  Here's some pics of one of the rockier trails we traversed.

The other prevalent feature of Turkey Run are the stairs... there's lots and lots of them... some built with wood, others carved out of the existing rocks.  There is actually one trail that's marked 140 steps and that's no lie.  At the end of the day, Melissa got worn out from being carried all day so she decided to go to sleep on daddy's shoulder.  ;)

This is on our last day of hiking... the two pics on the left are of a very old and very abandoned coal mine.   All you can see now is the entrance since it's obviously quite dangerous and it's also loaded with bats.  The other pics show one of the more famous trails at Turkey Run... a wide path between two nearly vertical cliffs.

Many of the paths at Turkey Run follow streams and creek beds.  In some locations, the geography narrows so much that the only choice is just to walk right through the river, which is no more than a couple inches deep.  The left pics show a couple of those types of trails.   The right pic is a lizard we ran into on one of the many stairs.

The two left pics show the area called the "Punch Bowl".  On the last day, we finally got the courage to let Melissa walk on her own (well, we held her hand) for awhile.  We were slightly afraid that she would chase off into the forest and get covered in Poison Oak but thankfully she was a very good girl and stayed on the paths.  Daddy was certainly relieved to not have to carry her for a little while.  :)

One of the days after hiking, we went down to see an old restored town called Billie Creek Village.   They have restored pretty much an entire town including two churches, a school, a doctor's office, a bank, a candy store, blacksmith, stables, a broom shop along with three covered bridges!  The town is very impressive but unfortunately it only operates with a full staff on the weekends and we stopped by on Thursday.

More Billie Creek Village.

Poor Melissa was so worn out... here she is sleeping on mommy's shoulder this time.  There was also a cat that lives at the village hanging out in the streets... obviously a very friendly cat.  ;)

And of course, a Mescher vacation wouldn't be a Mescher vacation if trains were not involved at some point.  ;)  At the far left is the Rockville, IN train station which is close to Billie Creek Village and serves as the visitor center for the city of Rockville.   The other five images are from the Linden RR museum.  Linden is a small town of less than 1000 pop. but they have a very nice railroad museum featuring two cabooses, a box car, some MoW equipment and two operating model train layouts.  The second picture is the Linden RR station, the third is the inside of the bay window caboose.

Here's the Linden RR museum's HO scale train layout.  Melissa was fascinated by the two trains running simultaniously.  :)

Here's Linden's N scale layout which was donated to them by a prize winning modeler.  The detail and craftmanship is absolutely amazing.  It looked just as good in real life as it does in these pictures. That does it for the Mescher vacation 2002!  Hope you enjoyed the show.  ;)