There's something I really like about Indiana. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but I felt the same way my first time through, all those weeks ago. It's just simple farm land, nothing particularly majestic or breathtaking, but the neat, well-kept farms and the green of the countryside appeal to me. I spent the day driving through the far northern part of the state, on my way into Michigan.

As I motored through corridors of high-as-an-elephant's-eye corn, it occurred to me that many of the impressions I've gotten of the places I've seen along the way have been greatly affected by the season. Indiana in late August, on a comfortably warm afternoon with a vivid blue sky up above and the fields of the aforementioned towering stalks of corn ready for harvest whizzing by, is, I suspect, a vastly different place than Indiana on a grey-skied, snowy, bitterly cold January day. Of course, the fine people who call Indiana home remain a constant but, if I never returned here again, I'd always remember the Hoosier state as I saw it today.

I stopped in Wakarusa to see an attraction called The Bird's Eye View Museum. It's the pride and joy of Mr. Devon Rose, who began it as a tiny train town for his boys to use for their Lionels. Rose prides himself on building exact replicas of structures found there in his town; he's almost obsessive about his creations, housed in the basement of his home. He even considered adding bird droppings to the roof of one of them (in the end, he decide against it).

Each visitor receives a lecture explaining, perhaps even more extensively than one might hope, just how he creates that siding, those shingles, that window frame; no detail is left unexplained. His fervor is contagious, however. I came in somewhat skeptical; at first glance, the exhibit is somewhat underwhelming as a tourist attraction. In the end, Mr. Rose won me over a bit with his enthusiasm. Drop by and see the Bird's Eye Museum if you're in the area; it'll please Mr. Rose no end.

Continue on the American Odyssey.
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