Rain! For the first time on my trip (other than a few spritzing moments in New Jersey), it is actually not crystal clear and sunny. It's Sunday morning in Bowling Green, and it seems I'm the only one awake except for the waitress at the nearby Waffle House, where I grab breakfast and read the Sunday comics.

I only left Mom's house four days ago, but already I need to do laundry again. Seems that in my rush to leave LA, I packed some rather odd numbers of essential items. Either that or someone's been stealing my t-shirts along the way. Luckily, there's a laundromat next to my Best Western. I'll sort through my pictures on my iBook while my shirts slosh and spin.

After a brief rainy drive to explore the little college town of Bowling Green, I head toward Indiana. Crossing the heart of America, I also cross over my eastbound path, somewhere around Fremont, IN, and just about 4,200 miles from home.

Driving across different states, I've started making mental notes of their unique ways of communicating along the highways. Each state seems to feel that the route signs for their local roads merit a defining graphic treatment, and Indiana does this by placing the route number inside a white silhouette in the shape of Indiana. Nothing too special about that, except that, in order to fit three-digit highways, they simply extend the shape of the state until it looks more like Oklahoma minus the panhandle than the more vertical outline of Indiana. I suppose it was easier than replacing all the state's route signs once they got past Highway 99.

Once again I am in barn country, and the uniform color of weathered wood across the landscape suggests that red barn paint has not been available in Indiana for a good 50 years. The big rainstorm has evidently weakened as it left Chicago, and the last drops are wiped from the windshield before I reach South Bend.

South Bend is notably the home of the Fighting Irish, a.k.a. Notre Dame University, and less recently notably, the late Studebaker automobile company. I'm here to see the cars, not the college.

I'm also here to explore the city, and its downtown core clings to life with a nice array of buildings from 1900 to the present. Sadly, I've arrived just in time to watch a 1902 structure, during its life a clothing store, warehouse and paint store, in the process of becoming an empty city lot with the help of a wrecking ball. I stop to watch and say good-bye with my camera to something I never knew.

My time inside the Studebaker museum is covered in the next chapter, but the remains of the company are included in this chapter's photo album. Some of the factory buildings have been re-purposed for smaller industry. Some have been razed, one to make room for the St Joseph County Jail. Others sit vacant.

I leave South Bend with a quick glimpse at the Notre Dame campus, its gold-domed central building now gleaming in the once-again bright autumn sun. I head west along I-80/90, then exit on Highway 421 toward Lake Michigan's Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Here I hope to seek out the town, if it even amounts to that, of Beverly Shores, for what should amount to a time-traveling architectural treat (which I cover two chapters ahead). Instead, I am greeted by threatening clouds and a pair of old stone pillars through which leads a narrow, tree-tunneled road. I accept its lure.

Without finding any evidence of a town, I do begin to find homes, most of them of the summer cottage variety, almost trailer-like. One such home has a front yard filled with plastic deer. I stop to gawk and realize they are real, and just stopping by to graze as I gaze.

My cell phone rings (funny how that happens when you're in the middle of nowhere), and it's my friend Enrique, calling to glow about his cool new car and let me know how my cat Jack is doing. As I crest a small hill, the call drops, the street ends, and I am 20 feet from Lake Michigan. The sky exhales, swirls a rustle of red and yellow leaves around my Jeep, and begins to throw rain at me. Across the lake, I see a backlit storm, the hint of a waterspout and grey in between.

Sorry, but you'll have to read the chapter devoted to Beverly Shores to find out whether I am swept out to sea or live to hear "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" on the radio ever again...