-----Over the past several days, our hotel breakfasts have been slipping from the upward side of mediocrity down towards the barely edible. After a couple of pancakes that hardly deserved the name—and how on Earth do you mess up a pancake?—we headed out of Champaign towards the Indiana border. We picked up much traffic en route to Indianapolis, and instead of skirting around it, we went directly into its heart to Victory Field, home of the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians.

-----But what was to become the enduring theme of our time in Indiana is that you can't drink the water. Something—I know not what—happened to the water supply in the entire region. A sign was posted on rest areas saying that water should be boiled for five minutes before using, and that same rest area featured a man mumbling to himself in one of the stalls.

-----We entered Indianapolis on the bad side of town, and made it around heavily tilted buses to the downtown complex that includes Lucas Oil Stadium—home of the Indianapolis Colts—as well as Victory Field, which we were after. Being Saturday, they were using the stadium for the high school championship tournament, and it had a decent-sized crowd. We explained our inexplicable quest to the folks letting people in, and they allowed my dad to idle the car outside while my mom and I ran in to get a pennant.

-----They had no pennant, but they were nice about it and we got a hat instead. They're between styles of pennant and as of yet have not received their new shipment, but since we've been there—finally, after three times in the immediate area—we'll allow ourselves the luxury of ordering one.

-----If there is a more heinous and hideous stretch of Interstate in the country than the one between Indianapolis and Louisville, I've yet to witness it. Trucks would seemingly make a game of passing each other, nearly swiping oblivious and speeding cars off the road and nearly tipping over themselves. Not a single highway patrol car was so much as parked on the side of the road to enforce the rules and customs associated with a pleasant highway experience. On top of all this, the road surface itself was so pockmarked that I longed for the Klondike Highway for the second time in as many days.

-----We exited the highway in Columbus in pursuit of our daily Jimmy John's lunch, but it was much too far off of the highway. The built-up area featured a menagerie of restaurants and gas stations, so we pulled into a Culver's only to realize that not only was it closed, but every other eating establishment was as well. In the door was pasted a sign saying that they were closed due to the water contamination. Gas was the only thing we could get before we got back on the infernal road south.

-----There was a toll bridge across the Ohio River to Louisville, but the toll never materialized. Instead, the nastiness of the Indiana road was now the nastiness of the Kentucky road, and the worst offenders were those who were hauling things that they ought not to have been and/or had University of Kentucky paraphernalia on their bumpers or back windshields. There was something decidedly unpleasant about having to drive through it, but the sheer amount of traffic had cleared out significantly.

-----We got off in the suburbs of Lexington for a Culver's dinner, as it is the last time we'll eat their cheese curds and burgers and pot roast sandwiches for a long while. It wasn't crammed with the screaming kids we'd come to expect, and it was not long before we were working our way through the pastoral Kentucky countryside, past horse farms and rolling pastures, to the suburb of Winchester, where our hotel's miserable exterior belies one of the most updated and fancy interiors we've been at. (They even have a small spread of hors d'oeuvres near the front desk.)

-----Tomorrow: we get home.