A few years ago, I was interviewing a shopkeeper in a small city some distance from Fort Wayne when he opened a door at the back of the store to reveal a village.

An indoor village.

As it turned out, his store had previously been a restaurant whose extravagant décor looked like something out of Epcot.

I am thinking specifically of Epcot’s Mexico Pavilion, under the roof of which a bustling Mexican village marketplace, complete with an indoor canal and a twilight-painted ceiling, has been industriously reproduced.

There was no canal in this defunct restaurant but every other municipal detail had been approximated with evident enthusiasm.

Why hadn’t the shopkeeper renovated this space? Well, I am guessing it’s the same reason so many spaces don’t get renovated in small Indiana cities and towns. No one has the money. Even the banks don’t have the money. Deferred renovation can amount to accidental preservation.

I recently walked into a bakery in Noble County I’d heard about and discovered that it was located in an old general store. How did I know it had been an old general store? Because it still looked like an old general store! It still had the rolling ladders, the glass display cases and a mezzanine for storage.

The owner of the bakery had spruced everything up but had kept the old store’s character thrillingly intact.

I love stuff like this. I love entering a place intending to purchase a piece of prinzregententorte or a schneeball or a few quarkbällchen or some other old standby and discovering that I’ve walked through a time portal.

You don’t get this feeling when you walk into a bakery that has been furnished, for some reason, to resemble a wealth-management firm. Presumably someone will be along shortly to discuss financing your éclair.

What am I getting at here?

There are surprises everywhere.

I love wandering around Indiana cities, towns and villages (not to mention hamlets, principalities and parishes) hoping to happen upon a few. I get the feeling that the surprises are waiting there to be happened upon by out-of-towners like me who have retained a youthful perspective where happening upon things is concerned.

There is much to discover out there in all 11 counties of northeast Indiana … and beyond!

And I am not just referring here to the things that end up in the county tourism guides.

Which is not meant as a disparagement of county tourism guides. They’ll steer you toward plenty of worthy things.

Without them, a traveler might spend an entire afternoon in a county without knowing what he was supposed to have enjoyed.

I am referring here to tourist attractions that don’t even know they are tourist attractions, perhaps because they were brought up in households where tourist attractions were discouraged from calling attention to themselves.

It may seem to you that I am getting confused, but believe me when I say that once you get to know tourist attractions that don’t know they are tourist attractions as well as I do, they start confiding in you.

They can be terribly insecure. Tell an old general store that you admire its original counters and sliding ladders and it may shrug, roll its eyes and gesture vaguely in the general direction of a water stain on the ceiling.

They are always humble, these tourist attractions that don’t know they are tourist attractions.

Nothing like the biggest ball of twine, which has become insufferably arrogant.

The owners of these tourist attractions that don’t know they are tourist attractions are never not people you are glad to have met.

They tend to be enthusiasts who risked a lot to make their dream real and make it last.

Their enthusiasm is contagious.

They don’t have a lot of money for advertising, so they count on word of mouth, which is one of the reasons I write this issue’s cover story every year.

The other reason is that when people share their enthusiasm with me, it becomes my enthusiasm.

Then I have to share it with you and make it your enthusiasm.

And, as this year’s cover story will attest to, there are plenty of things closer to home that you have not yet had a chance to be enthusiastic about.

There may be something five minutes away from you to which someone has devoted half their lifetime and that you didn’t know existed for half of yours.

This can be embarrassing, but it is also tremendously encouraging. It means that no matter how long you have lived in a place, there are still new things to discover.

So have a look around. If you find something wonderful, tell me about it.

Home

Yours To Discover