Our Night in Jail

The local Hoosiers said we missed the end of the fall colors by a week. Oh well, no fall foliage/covered bridge shots for us though I guess the colors of the bridges should shine. We were lucky that it wasn't too cold or worse, raining as we walked quite a bit looking for those bridges.

It was a much longer drive there than I remembered even though a new freeway opened up in Ohio lopping off 30 minutes or so. We stopped in Zionsville, a fancy suburb of Indy for lunch at a place we ate at long ago full of rich ladies that lunch. We walked around some admiring the cute shops. One restaurant featured soft drinks I never heard of. Rhubarb soda? Lavender soda? We ate dessert at a patisserie specializing in French macaroons. The owner was a former airline attendant assigned to Paris where she became obsessed with Laduree macaroons. Once she figured out how to make them (and I bet they are difficult), she opened up Le Dolce Vita mangling the French and Italian language. My favorite: Caramel Sale. Now 'sale' is Italian for salt but she is describing a French macaroon. In French, 'sale' means dirty which isn't what she meant. So her language skills are sketchy but excellent coffee and macaroons.

Fancy bathroom in lunch place

The French macaroon place

nice iron work on one of the buildings

We were mired in traffic jams around Indy so on the way back, we avoided coming any where near it.

Rockville, county seat of Parke County is 60 miles due west of Indy almost to the Illinois border.The mayor of the town, Debra, owns our Old Jail Inn, the former county jail. 2700 people live in town, another 1200 right outside in the Women's maximum security prison and the town is surrounded by 1000 Amish (she claims that makes them diverse). Do the women prisoners count as they can't vote? Yes because the city provides utilities to the prison. Famous prisoner? Daughter of Ariel Castro (crazoid in Cleveland that kidnapped 3 teenagers) who slit her baby with a knife due to craziness. And they have the three generation scary family there of murderers. We were the only customers that day. And as she was off doing mayor stuff at night, we had the entire jail to ourselves. Sort of spooky. Included in our voucher was breakfast at the Jailhouse Cafe, a jail tour (did that on our own) and a bottle of wine from the Drunk Tank that is open on weekends only in the basement. Good wine.

But while there was daylight, off we went equipped with a  not very good map (and we couldn't use our phones as it is in a Verizon dead zone and the internet wouldn't work either in the Inn) to go find those 31 covered bridges some of them on deserted one lane dirt roads. We got lost several times. I think we saw 12 bridges in all, half on the first day, half on the second. We missed about 5 nearby that we just could not find. The countryside and the bridges were very pretty as hopefully our photos indicate. Restaurants were few even though we were staying right on the town square (Jailhouse Cafe is not open at night).We found a Mexican (well, I guess they have some diversity)restaurant on the outskirts of town that seemed to be in a remodeled car garage. But the food was very good . Then we went back to our deserted Jail for the night.

Below is the door for our Bonnie and Clyde suite: The  guns were the decor and the cellblock which had about 6 less expensive rooms. One of the pictures is the outside of the building.

Unlike the former inmates, we had a pillowtop bed which was comfy. We needed extra blankets as we couldn't figure out how to make the heat work. Nor did we had internet. Maybe Debra turned the router off? But the wine was tasty and there were lots of interesting books on Covered Bridges and Famous felons (what a combo) so we were entertained. We could have watched TV if we chose but it was a fun day. More tomorrow.