After seeing Christy, Leeman and the trips off John, Tony and I headed to Parke County to see some covered bridges. Parke County Indiana boasts the most covered bridges of all counties in the world—and I think they may be right. This county has 31 covered bridges. We had limited time so we headed out and saw 7. Not bad for an afternoon outing.

We stopped at:

The Narrows Covered Bridge, Cox Ford Bridge, Jackson Bridge, Marshall Bridge,West Union, Sim Smith Bridge and Phillips Bridge

I hope to go back one day and see the rest of them. I am pretty sure my son had a great time visiting all these bridges. I noticed he posted some pictures on Instagram and labeled them “Nerd Alert” spent time with the parents. So next time I visit, I’ll let him join us again.

After that we headed back to the house to eat lunch and then head out. We wanted to spend one night in The Badlands—One of our favorite boondocking spots and since it was 1000 miles away we thought we would get a few miles in before settling down for the night.

There is gold mining in Indiana! Seriously. We got our gold mining permit and set out with Tony to try our luck. On the way we were stopped only 1/2 mile from our exit for 45 minutes due to a car fire. We saw smoke but, by the time we finally passed the location there was nothing to see.

At a dead stop!

I can’t tell you where we went but it took a while to get there. Especially after sitting on the interstate for almost an hour.

We found some gold. We found about 5 specks which is really really a small amount but made it worth it. Tomorrow we plan to go to Parke County in Indian. It claims to have the most covered bridges of any county. And they are probably right. There are 26 covered bridges in Parke County. We’ll let you know.