The Daniel in the Dell

I took my last weekend before classes resume to go visit old chums from college who have lived in Indiana their whole lives, which is a concept both foreign and interesting to me.
South through Cincinnati, right at Louisville, down 64 to Evansville. My friends there have a six-year-old girl, so I got to practice parenting at dinner:
"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you drink the whole bowl of salsa."
She passed.
"I'm going to be a daddy soon; can I change your diaper later?"
"...I'm SIX!"
"...so, what, you change your own?"
I also saw my friend's parents, who I hadn't seen in over ten years. Her mom made me pumpkin pies. Just like old times.
Evansville to Bloomington has no major highways, so I drove through the same winding country roads from fifteen years ago, post-harvest corn stalks dying on either side as far as you could see, which wasn't very much what with the Soviet Helicopter-sized farm equipment driving in front of me.
A quick lunch with a friend there, I then took a couple hours to walk around my old dorm and the college campus. It's still beautiful as all git out.
An hour drive east to Columbus (still IN, not OH) for dinner with another friend who is two days pregnanter than My Lovely Very Pregnant Wife, and then up to Indianapolis for my last visit. It's odd, in a transitive unsmelly-nomad life like mine, to have known these girls for over seventeen years now. It's just nice to be within a couple hours' drive of them for a change.