Parke County

During the humid, family laden vacation, Jason and I escaped for a day and drove to Parke County, the "Covered Bridge Capital of the World." The county touts 34 covered bridges, more than any other county in the world.









Most of the bridges are off the main roads but we had our map and our GPS (which as you can see wasn't too helpful) and were able to visit ten of the historic bridges before "gee this bridge looks a lot like the last bridge" kicked in.

We made it to Rockville, the county seat where we had lunch under the watchful eye of a stuffed dear head, stuffed elk, stuffed pheasant, stuffed rabbit, stuffed boar and a mystery animal that may have been the mythical Jackelope. The funny thing about this mausoleum of wild animals is that the pub also had a huge Budweiser poster that said that every Bud you buy goes to support animal and nature conservation efforts in the local area. Hmmm... I wonder if the dear, elk, pheasant, rabbit, boar and Jackelope appreciate those efforts.

Off the soap box and back to the bridges. Most of the bridges were built between 1865-1920, but the one in Bridgeton was built in 2006 (we didn't notice the tin roof until we had crossed it twice.) Their original bridge was burned by an arsonist in 2005 and the entire county rallied to build a new one. (You never really think you need fire insurance on the town bridge, but I guess you do.) A local land owner donated the trees on his property, and the local mill produced the wood, an engineering firm donated the labor and plans and whmamo - replacement bridge. It's a good thing to because Bridgeton had two things - a bridge and a flour mill. The flour mill was no more than 10 feet wide and produces flour and cornmeal for the tourists coming to view the bridge.

Lastly, Parke County is Amish country and we had to dodge a few horse buggies. It was kind of cool and we refrained from taking photos of the Amish folk. I likened it to how rude would it be to take a photo of someone because they were black... pretty rude.

I'm glad we did it and not sad that we stopped at 10 bridges. I am thankful that we missed "the Bridge Festivals" because it was nice not sharing our photo ops with 1.5 million people who come during that 2 week time frame.