Indiana Nights in Prophetstown
A weekend of biking, swimming, and glorious sunsets in a newer state park
Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of 2024.
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Ever since moving back to Indiana, my husband Jeff and I keep saying it over and over again: why didn’t we come here before? We keep discovering so many places we didn’t visit when we were young and childless and had so much more freedom than we did when we started camping with our kids.
And we recognize that part of the reason was we didn’t adventure nearly as much as we thought we did. We had our old haunts in Michigan where we camped and we had our favorite parks in Indiana and we didn’t do much more. We didn’t have much time to try new places. If we were going to go camping, we wanted to know what we were getting ourselves into.
That is probably why we never tried out Prophetstown State Park, which was brand new when we first lived in Indianapolis.
As we prepared for a summer camping season that started Memorial Day weekend and included our epic trip out to Yellowstone, Jeff started looking at other state parks we could squeeze in during the two months the kids and I were off from school. He got on the waiting list for a handful of parks we wanted to visit for weekend camping trips. The first to come up was our mid-June trip to Turkey Run State Park. On our way to Turkey Run, he got a message that a spot had opened up at Prophetstown, a place that looked ideal for late summer. So even though it meant we would be camping two weekends after a two-week trip out west and mere days before we all started school, we jumped on it.
Our son invited one of his best friends to join us so we had three kids for the weekend. Almost as soon as we arrived, they all took off, the boys on bikes and our daughter walking to the playground just to check it out. Once we had camp set up and dinner prepared, we were able to sit in front of a campfire with the sun setting over the prairie grass behind our site.
The kids couldn’t wait to explore the next day. Prophetstown has a five-mile paved bike trail that goes through the entire park, making it easy to safely get from one location to the next. The boys were ready to go to the state park pool as soon as it opened and our daughter wanted to join me to check out the farmer’s market at the farm on site, so we temporarily split. The farmer’s market was nothing more than an offering of meat and a variety of eggs from the working farm in the park, but it was still a fun display of the history of farming in Indiana. The two houses on the farm are Sears Roebuck houses, so it was fun to explain to my 15-year-old how people used to be able to buy houses from a catalog and have all of the parts delivered to their empty land. The bigger house, which was open, reminded me a lot of my great-grandmother’s house in Iowa, which brought back a lot of childhood memories.
Then we joined the boys back at the state park pool. There are several Indiana state parks with pools open during the summer months, but this was the nicest pool we had ever visited. For $5 a piece, we had access to two slides, a lazy river, and other swim areas.
With temperatures in the mid-80s, it was a perfect day to visit a water park. The whole family had fun on the tube slide and our son and his friend went down the body slide more times than we could count. We got our money’s worth from the afternoon, and since we were staying at the campground, we could ride our bikes back and forth to get lunch.
Once everyone rested from an entire afternoon in the sun, the boys took off to find the kids they had met while at the pool, joining in a random game of kickball at the end of our camping loop. We stayed back at the campsite where Jeff and I made dinner and Jeff and our daughter played a few rounds of cornhole before the boys came back to play against them. Honestly, it was everything a good camping day should be.
We experienced another glorious Indiana sunset before going to bed. I even got to take a few pictures of my latest book at the campground before its September release.
Was the weekend perfect? No. Our daughter forgot her bathing suit, so I drove with her to Lafayette late Friday night to piece something together. (Yes, I could have made our 15-year-old suffer for not paying attention to the packing list I gave her, but the pool was supposed to be a family activity.) Our son’s friend got stomach pains Saturday night and his dad had to come and get him. (He’s okay now.) And it started raining on Sunday morning while we packed up, which prevented us from doing a little more biking and exploring the Native American village by the visitor center. But it was still a really good weekend and we found a new Indiana state park to fall in love with.
Not back for camping on a whim right before school starts, right?
Do you want to know more about how I plan our vacations? Check out this blog post and get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:
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Your camping and adventure photos are always so great. I love "coming along for the ride".