Last month our family took a week off and had a “stay-cation,” hitting a lot of places within easy driving distance of home.  My goal has been to write up little reviews of every place we went, then combine them into ideas for you to have your own staycation, day trip, whatever.  Of course, then life happened.  Everyone got sick, plans got ruined, life’s little dramas ensued….  But here is one of our first stops on the trip, Mounds State Park in Anderson.

Anderson is an easy trip for us.  Way easier than I thought, actually.  I always think of Anderson as somewhere “way up north,” but it turns out it’s less than 30 miles from my house.  Of course, it kind of depends which side of the city you live on, but you can probably get there in less than an hour.

What makes Mounds State Park special is….  wait for it….  Mounds!  Yeah, turns out Native Americans known as the Adena-Hopewell people lived here and created these giant works of art out of the land back in the BCE days.  They built what seem like just hills, but turns out like so many prehistoric people, these things are pretty much perfect.

The nature center shows a model of what these mounds actual look like from an aerial view.  Pretty impressive, huh?  The theory is that these were used for religious celebrations.

Outside of the nature center is a canoe created in modern time by state park employees, but made in the same way the Adena-Hopewell people would have made it thousands of years ago.  We tried to explain to the kids how much work went in to creating this, and how patient and strong the Adena-Hopewell people must have been, but mostly they just thought it was a cool boat to climb in and pretend to be vikings.  Eh, whatever works.

Also just outside the nature center is a small children’s garden.  Little Man especially loved exploring this.  There are wind chimes, a tree with a face, toadstools, many different plants to smell and touch, and much more.  This is what I want my backyard to look like.  So fun and interesting.

Once Hubby dragged us away from the nature center (which took quite a lot of effort.  As you can tell the outside is pretty cool, and the inside was neat as well.  There were snakes and amphibians to see, examples of the nature found at the park to feel, and even some noisy things.), we headed toward the Great Mound.  I’m glad we visited the center first, because once you’re out there and face-to-face with it, the mound doesn’t seem that impressive.  Honestly it just looks like little hills.  You need to understand the history of it and see the models of it to appreciate it for what it is.  The Great Mound seemed to be fenced off, so we didn’t walk out onto it or anything.  Which probably also doesn’t help it’s like of impressiveness (is that a word?).  So we kind of stood there at the fence and said, “yep, that’s a mound,” and weren’t sure what to do next.  We wandered a little further and found this adorably fuzzy guy.  This doesn’t add anything to my story, but he was so willing to pose for me that I felt he should be included.

Then we wandered over to Fiddle Back Mound, which you can walk on.  The boys had a lot of fun just running around the open areas and exploring.

We didn’t spend as long at this park as we have some others, because it was just one stop in a longer day, so I don’t feel I hiked enough to really make a judgment on how strenuous the trails are.  We mostly stayed on trails 1 and 5, both of which are pretty easy and flat.  From what I experienced, this park is more interesting for its historical value than its scenic trails.  But I think we learned a few things, and it got us out in nature, so I’d say it was a good day.

For more information you can visit the DNR’s website for this property.

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