Clockwise — south from Nashville IN on IN-135 through Story, west to Bedford, then back north to close the loop
Indiana Isn't Supposed to Have Hills
Indiana isn't supposed to have hills. Nobody told Brown County.
Tucked into the southern corner of the state, Brown County is the Indiana nobody expects — steep wooded ridges and fog-filled hollows the locals call the Little Smokies, the one stretch of the state the glaciers never flattened. That makes it a rarity: genuinely curvy, climbing, forested back roads in the middle of the cornfield Midwest, looped around the artist town of Nashville, the biggest lake in the state, and the limestone country that built half of America's landmarks. Come in October and the hardwood ridges go up in color — just know that all of Indiana comes with you, and little Nashville jams solid on a peak weekend.
Start with griddle cakes and the Bird's Nest Benedict at the Bird's Nest Café in downtown Nashville, in the heart of the old art colony. Then drive out to Story, a near-ghost-town hamlet whose 1850s general store is now the Story Inn — garden-to-table food, a beloved dining room, and the Blue Lady, the resident ghost said to haunt the room above the old store.
Drop south to Hardin Ridge on the shore of Lake Monroe — at nearly eleven thousand acres the largest lake in Indiana — for a forest-and-water leg-stretch in the Hoosier National Forest. You're in limestone country now: the pale, almost pure Salem limestone quarried just south of here, three hundred million years old, clads the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, and some thirty-five state capitols.
Lunch on pulled pork and ribs at Smokin Jim's down in Bedford — the limestone capital itself — then loop back to Nashville for dinner at Big Woods Pizza, the alley pizzeria that grew into one of Indiana's best-known names. Sleep in Bloomington at the Grant Street Inn, a historic B&B built around an 1883 Queen Anne, steps from the limestone-clad campus of Indiana University.
And hold the plan loosely — Brown County is all back roads, and you should drive the ones that aren't on the list. The plan's a backbone, not a cage: the ridge overlook the map doesn't name, the covered bridge, the gallery in a converted barn, the quarry where the stone for a landmark came out of the ground. The Little Smokies reward the driver who treats a wrong turn as the point. Just watch for deer on the wooded curves and color-season traffic in Nashville, and let an overlook or a cider stand stretch the afternoon. The best stop is the one that wasn't on the list. Go find it.
