Indiana Dunes

Who knew there were beautiful sandy beaches in a National Park 30 minutes outside of downtown Chicago?

Well, maybe Tom Petty, as he sang about those Indiana Dunes and an Indiana night...

We were pleasantly surprised at the beautiful of Indiana Dunes National Park. We stopped here for just a few hours as we took several days to traverse in our Chevrolet all the way around Lake Michigan, from Chicago to Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and back down through Indiana.

We climbed 238 steps as part of #DianaDunesDare. We retraced the steps of Diana, who left the Windy City to live in the wildness of these dunes in the 1910s, making the Chicago newspaper columns for daring to swim nude.

We saw first hand the difference in vegetation of a dune over time and height, from deep woods to savannah, to sandy beaches. Oddly, the Jack pine, a native of the Arctic, has sprouted here.

It may have looked like a beautiful Gulf Coast beach, but, as a sticker in the gift shop read, our boys splashed in waves that were "unsalted and shark free." They splashed for about an hour or so, and had a blast, as we relaxed on the beach, with Chicago's skyline as our view.