through the top window. The world’s largest museum for kids houses artifacts ranging from 3,000-year-old hiero- glyphic-filled Egyptian slabs in a replica tomb of Pharaoh Seti I to a cannon from Captain Kidd’s abandoned ship, the Cara
smiles down on Indianapolis from a three- or four-story mural, one of 46 painted on building walls and along the Central Canal as part of the city’s efforts to welcome the Super Bowl of the same number.
its 192-foot needle-like spire. Heading west on State Route 46, I skirt Brown County State Park and Yellowwood State Forest on my way to Bloomington, home of Indiana University. On campus, I stroll along heavily shaded
Still a thrill: Indy pace cars lap the track at a mere 130 miles per hour.
pathways until I get to a popular gazebo. “You’re not a true undergrad unless you’ve kissed someone at the stroke of midnight inside the gazebo,” former student Ryan Irvin tells me. Nearby Fourth Street, known locally as Restaurant Row, unwinds a string of international restaurants ranging from Ethiopian and Moroccan to Vietnamese and Tibetan cuisine. With Tibet in mind, I drive 7 miles along farmland and meadows to Indiana’s Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center. With eight buildings on 108 acres, the center includes a pagoda, two oval-like Buddhist stupas and a narrow building with Tibetan prayer wheels. The Dalai Lama has visited here, and its mission is to preserve and protect Tibetan and Mongo- lian religion, culture and heritage. The highlight of my visit is a medita- tion session led by Arjia Rinpoche, the center’s spiritual leader and monk. We listen to chanting, and in a lotus position meditate in abject silence. “Don’t think anything, don’t do anything, just control your mind,” advises Rinpoche. “Media- tion helps balance us.”
Indianapolis’ largest Fourth of July fireworks display sparkles from the top of a downtown bank tower, as viewed from the Central Canal in White River State Park.
Merchant , shipwrecked in 1699. The Power of Children exhibit helps kids learn about the struggles of youthful Holocaust victim Anne Frank, teenage AIDS casualty Ryan White and Ruby Bridges, one of the first children to attend a desegregated school in the 1960s. The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library displays the 1970s Smith-Corona typewriter of the famous author and native son. “To the best of my knowledge, it’s the typewriter on which he wrote Breakfast of Champions , Slapstick and Jailbird ,” says curator Chris Lafave. Also on exhibit are Vonnegut’s spectacles and an unopened World War II letter returned to his father while Vonnegut was missing in action. Not far from the library, Vonnegut
Upon leaving Indianapolis, I head south on I-65 to Columbus, ranked sixth among U.S. cities in architectural design and innovation by the American Institute of Architects, behind only New York, Washington and San Francisco. “People don’t expect to see the art, architecture and quality of life we have here in a town of 40,000,” says Susan Whittaker of the Columbus Area Visitors Center. I walk by the 1874 Bartholomew County Courthouse with its green mansard roofs and clock tower. On the grounds stands the Veterans Memorial with its symmetrical rows of white stone pillars, inscribed with letters to loved ones from soldiers who would never come home. Another prominent struc- ture is the North Christian Church with
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