Potawatomi Inn 2025
Drove the family up to Pokagon State park in North East Indiana. Deep in the center of the park rests The Potawatomi Inn. When we were about 30 minutes out from our destination we started getting weather alerts for extreme Thunderstorms. A few tornadoes did touch down and there were a few fatalaties. Right as we pulled up to the front door of the lodge there were extreme winds and the tornado siren went off. After less than 5 minutes the wind died down and the storm eased up. We rested and dried by the fireplace while this storm was winding down. Then we went to the dining room to get some supper. The aesthetics of the dining room were awesome. This is the kind of place that was built in the 1930's and looks like where 30's guys would relax, smoke cigars and engage in canoe related activities on the lake. The Inn hasn't been updated since the 1990's which made it look HAUNTED but it wasn't. Despite searching onlin for cool ghost stories there were none to be had anywhere in the county. Disappointing. In the vastly superior state of Ohio every city has some ghost stories so it was odd not finding any in that entire region.
This is the rear end of the Inn. That's the pool which has an observation deck to look out onto the lake. The pool was pretty nice but the hot tub was lacking in HEAT. I would probably boil myself like a peanut if I had my hand on the temp controls.
I didn't get a picture of the front of the building because of the rushed entry dodging tornadoes.
Walking the kids down to the lake.
I took the kids down by the lake. They found lots of shells and enjoyed throwing sticks around in the sand.
My son especially enjoyed finding shells on the beach.
After we ate I went back to the truck to get our bags and move to an actual parking spot. My son saw this worm and we moved him back to the dirt. My son says some of the most precious stuff you will ever hear. He waved goodbye and said "Have a nice life worm!" Man that kid is awesome.
While checking in after dinner when the internet was back up my daughter was playing with these Bigfoot walking sticks.
My daughter made them smooch. This cracked me up. She's a hilarious little girly.
There were tons of relaxing sitting zone scattered around the place. Lots of fire places and taxidermied animals. I didn't take enough good pictures. Oops. Maybe I will get better at this for the sake of my adventure pages.
There was also a little arcade and game room area.
I enjoyed ping pong quite a bit with my BB.
I thought the Sega UFO catcher was really neat. I could now LARP as Kiryu.
I won each of my kids a stuffy. A unicorn for my daughter and a monkey for my son. They were pretty excited. If I had more quarters I would have tried to grab something for my BB and myself.
The halls definitely look haunted.
There were taxidermied animals all over the place.
Out on the trails there was a spring house.
We all sampled the spring water. I had a gallon jug in the truck so I grabbed it dumped out the waer and filled it with the healing spring waters of Pokagon state park.
Then we rolled out and ate breakfast at the Blue Gate in Shipshewana Indiana. I didn't take any pictures there so this is just off of google image search. I guess this is an Amish tourist town and they have performers at their theatre pretty often. There was a lot of promotion of the upcoming appearance of Jay Leno.
The only pics I took are of Jay Leno promos LMAO.
The coming of Jay Leno as foretold by the menu.
My son had to pee and I thought strapping kids down so Dads can take a dump was funny. After that we went to the restaurants bakery and got some doughnuts and they were awesome. I got a caramel long John and it was the sweetest thing I've ever had in all my days. There is no photographic evidence as baked goods this good are as elusive as a Bigfoot.
Then we grabbed some freshly baked pretzels at Ben's Soft Pretzels. They were really good too.
They had some wiener rolls and pizz roll type things that looked pretty good.
Ben's Big Menu.
If you're in the area check out the Amish Dill. Even da Bishop approves. That's pretty high praise I guess.
The dining room. We didn't sit down to enjoy our pretzels we tried to find some buggy rides but they were mostly closed for the off season. The one that was typically open was not due to cleaning up storm damage from the tornadoes the day before. That was a bummer.
There was a general store with a LOT of shoes for sale and a quilting area. There were several quilts on display and this one appears to have the pattern of those reflective high visibility triangles that are on the back of Amish buggys. That was hilarious to me.
There was a book rack of what appears to be Amish fiction. I can't help but imagine that these are spicy romance novels.
The standout title of course is The Rise and Fall of Miss Fannie's Biscuits. What could the mystery of Miss Fannie's Biscuits be about? I should have bought a copy honestly.
After failing to find a buggy ride we hopped into the truck and journeyed to Bryan Ohio to check out the Dum Dum factory tour. Which apparently has been closed since covid times. Trip Advisor failed to advise us of this though. Everyone talked about how cool the tour was. You got to ride a little trolley car around the factory and taste the snozzberries or whatever and it sounds awesome. Oh well. They did have this candy store in town which has a virtual tour. YAWN. My theory is that after covid they invested in the virtual tour which plays a video and has a few interactive games so they want to keep using that since they invested a bit of money into it. The Internet didn't stop hornswaggling us there though google erroniously listed their closing time as 7 PM. It was actually 5 PM which gave us about 20 minutes to look around.
There were a few knic knacs and doo dads available for sale but I didn't really want a keepsake of a candy store. Now a memento of a COOL ride through a factory would have sold me on a T shirt for sure. The kids got some cool stuff. There was a giant Dum Dum lolipop that was actually a vessel for the storage of actual normal size dum dums that my Daughter got. My son got a stuffed Dum Dum guy. I need to get a picture of that someday. It's pretty cool.
There were some historical items like the desk of Arthur G. Spangler who made the company and these cool watches. I would love to have one of these bad billys in my watch collection.
Just imagine how hard Arthur pounded this desk when some unruly kid hopped off the tour bus and ate one of the candy peanuts.
Apparently on the tour they would reveal the secret flavourings of the circus peanut. The coolest gift in the shop was of course the circus peanut pencil eraser. After our stop here we hopped in the truck and headed home. That was the end of our awesome two day trip to North East indiana and North West Ohio.
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