Let’s get the confusion out of the way first. One of the state’s two Nickle Plate Trails is 40-odd miles between Kokomo and Rochester. The other is in the northern Indianapolis suburbs.
The long one is part of the Great American Rail Trail, a developing cross-country trail route from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington. I admit it: biking a section of the Great American Rail Trail is on my bingo card for this year. So we stopped in Rochester and headed south for 9+ miles. And then the same back.
This is a former freight train line, so it’s straight, straight, straight with tiny elevation changes.
Those butterflies flitting around us — are they monarchs? What’s the difference between a monarch and a swallowtail anyway? These are orange and black, so I’m going with monarch.
This also is rural Indiana. We see only a handful of people on the trail — about the same number of cars we see on roads that cross the trail.
It’s still Indiana, so maintenance for this trail isn’t funded by those same rural taxpayers. I’ve been watching this on social media. It’s volunteer labor (like chopping with chainsaws and filling cracks with tar) and donations. Like the recent campaign for $14 per foot to patch the worst sections of the trail. Impressively, the friends group collected enough for almost a half-mile of work. All further south than the section we biked.
Exploring by bicycle 