Thursday September 3rd

…and on we go….

We left Sleeping Bear Dunes and north Michigan, after a couple of hours of school, heading south to Indiana. Thankfully we had an uneventful journey, with a lunch stop for eating and grocery shopping.

We arrived in good time, enabling Dave to set up his ‘dishes’ in the light – this process is thankfully getting quicker as he gets more adept each time he has to do it.

I wanted to get the Junior Ranger booklets so we could assess what needed to be done over the next couple of days. I called and they said the Centre would be closing at 6pm, giving me 30 minutes to get there, plenty of time as we were camping very closeby at Sand Creek Campground. When I checked the time though, somehow we’d gained an hour, the cell phones had switched time. This is the first time we’ve driven through a time zone, it was quite bizarre. For the purposes of work and knowing that we’d be driving back to EST in a week, we decided to stick with ‘our’ time and just get up and go to bed early!

When I went to the Visitor’s Center, a wonderful man explained the time zones. Most of Indiana is on EST, however the little area around Chicago is on Central to match up with the city. Evidently, there’s also a little pocket in southern Indiana that is on Central Time to match up with Kentucky, so strange, must get confusing.

Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore offers 3 Junior Ranger programs: Fire Ranger, Beachcomber and regular Junior Ranger – all come with patches, so I figured they’d probably want to complete them all. The National Park programs are so educational and will comprise a good amount of our curriculum this school year, giving us wonderful information on history, geography, geology, science and general social studies.