Indiana is a Midwestern state of farmland, river towns, and a surprising amount of basketball. It calls itself the Crossroads of America for good reason — more interstate highways meet here than in any other state — and that practical, in-between character runs through the place. People are friendly without making a fuss about it, and the landscape is mostly gentle: corn and soy fields rolling out to a flat horizon, broken in the south by the wooded hills of Brown County and in the north by the dunes along Lake Michigan.
Indianapolis, the capital, is the obvious place to start. It is a quietly likeable city with a walkable downtown, the excellent Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, and a serious food scene that has emerged in recent years. For one weekend each May the place is taken over by the Indy 500, the largest single-day sporting event in the world, when 300,000 people pack the Speedway for an afternoon of left turns at 230 miles per hour.
Bloomington, about an hour south, is home to Indiana University and has the limestone architecture, bookshops, and good restaurants you would expect of a serious college town. From Bloomington it is a short drive to Brown County State Park, the prettiest corner of the state, where the wooded hills turn spectacular in October. The artist colony of Nashville sits at the park's edge.
In the far north, the Indiana Dunes National Park runs along Lake Michigan — fifteen miles of beach, dunes, and oak savanna squeezed between the steel mills of Gary and the lake itself. It is an odd, beautiful place, and an easy day from Chicago. Elsewhere the state offers river towns like Evansville on the Ohio, the covered bridges of Parke County, and the Amish communities around Shipshewana, where horse-drawn buggies still share the road with cars.
