Day 22: 8/20/09: John Deere World Headquarters

370 miles: camped at Mounds State Park, Anderson, Indiana.

It is a beautiful warm evening here in Indiana at 8:00 PM, and I am writing this as I sit outside in a lawn chair sipping a beer. I'm watching Zoey play with a pine cone. Ah, the life of a blogger.

Steve and Jane Randall were very gracious hosts. Jane fixed breakfast for me before she left for her library job. They have a beautiful home that borders on a golf course. Steve has about a 20 minute commute to work for John Deere. After I got the camper packed up, I followed him as he drove to the corporate headquarters. He doesn't work in this building, but rather one a couple miles away. He is involved with computer software programing for dealers.

The lobby of the headquarters building is open to the public and has a huge display area and collection of John Deere memorabilia. I got to be a little kid in a toy store. There was everything from lawn mowers to combines to bulldozers on display. All inside. An interesting little side note. The original John Deere sculpture and logo featured a deer leaping and heading down, as if it was ready to land on the ground. Somebody in marketing decided that a deer facing down didn't project the right image for the company. So a new sculpture and logo were created to show a deer at the beginning of the leap, and thus facing up. This is supposed to convey the image that John Deere Co. is "leaping up and into the future." I guess image is everything.

I left John Deere about 9:30. My goal was to get about halfway to West Virginia. That would be somewhere in the Indianapolis area. I had scoped out a State Park about 25 miles to the east of there, so I aimed for it. Because I started late, 9:30, and I lost an hour on the clock due to coming back into Eastern Time, I chose to run Interstate 74 most of the way. As luck would have it, I hit Indianapolis right at rush hour.

I don't mean to get on a soapbox, BUT (my students right about now would be rolling their eyes and saying, "there he goes again") American has to find a better way of getting it's people to and from work, without thousands of cars, each carrying only one person, racing along at 70 miles per hour weaving in and out of traffic. OK, enough said.

Anyway, I'm camped at Mounds State Park. There are some Indian ceremonial mounds here dating back to 140 BC or so. I'll try to have more about them in tomorrow's post. Tonight the campground is only about a quarter full, but the ranger says that it fills up each weekend. Actually the campground is just a small part of the park. There are numerous hiking trails, several Indian mounds, and a large picnic area in the park as well.

By the way, thank you for the feedback I've been getting, both public and private. It means a lot to me.

See ya soon......