Can you dig it? This is Indiana's Largest Indoor Sandbox

As a kid, I loved playing in the sandbox. That is, of course, until our sandbox became an outdoor litter box for some very assertive neighborhood cats. Additionally, my childhood sandbox was often rained on, and it took several days to dry out. Looking back, we may have only had a few good days out of the year to play with our monster trucks and little plastic shovels.

Fast forward 20 years, and it looks like some folks have solved a few of those problems. In fact, these Hoosiers even took sandbox play to a whole new level, making it comparable to a beach visit or off-road excursion. While it may be a bit of a drive, this new sandbox experience is closer to home than you might think.

Where is it?

Indiana's largest indoor sandbox is located at Dig Dig for Kids in Fisher's Indiana, which is about three hours north of Evansville. The indoor sandbox offers kids the chance to interact with each other while playing with some pretty cool digging toys like dump trucks and kid-size excavators. The owners even gave out a really neat ride-on dump truck during the big total eclipse on April 8, 2024. Five-year-old me was very jealous.

Where did the idea come from?

Dig Dig for Kids was started by Billy Lomax at the end of 2023. Lomax got the inspiration for the mega sandbox from watching his grandson, Clark, who had a fascination with excavation equipment and other digging tools during his early life. Clark also had a limited vocabulary, so Lomax sought to establish a space for kids like Clark where they could interact with others in a creative environment. How cool is that?

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The size

I'm not kidding when I say that this sandbox is bigger than my house. According to Dig Dig for Kids, their sandbox is about 1,600 square feet, encompassing over 140,000 pounds of sand. It's probably safe to assume that's bigger than any backyard sandbox I ever played in as a kid.

KEEP READING: 40 Real Indiana Towns with Quirky, Weird, and Funny Names

Outside the major cities, the Hoosier state is full of tiny little towns you've probably passed through on your way to one of those cities. Most of them are likely 100 to 150 years old, or older, and have been around far longer than the large metropolitan areas such as Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Evansville. Typically, they were started by early settlers who found their way to the state and decided to make it home. Eventually, others would join them, and a community was formed. Over time, as the surrounding areas grew, most of them were folded into those areas and governed by the nearest city or county's governing body officially making them "unincorporated," meaning they did not have their own formally organized municipal government.

A scroll through Wikipedia's long list of unincorporated communities in Indiana shows several of them have names that by today's standards would be considered weird, quirky, or just downright right funny. These are my 40 favorities.

Gallery Credit: Ryan O'Bryan

10 Totally Wrong Assumptions We Had as Kids About How Things Work

I saw a question on Ask Reddit recently from user u/BlackbuckDeer that asked, what wrong assumptions we had as kids about how things work. I knew my answer instantly. When I was a kid, I thought the music played on the radio was done by the artists themselves sitting in the studio. I imagined a long line of artists twisting and turning their way down the hallways of the station waiting their turn to come on and play. I don't think that's what led to me being interested in a career in radio, but having now worked in the business for over 20 years and knowing how the songs get played, looking back on that thought makes me laugh a little bit. I figured if I had a thought like that, you probably did too. So, I put the question on Facebook. The responses were not only great, but when you think about it like a kid would, they all made perfect sense.

Gallery Credit: Ryan O'Bryan