Out and around the Residence Inn - Carmel

We have been staying in mostly, ensuring that Carl remains COVID free before his surgery.

On Thursday evening, we took a short walk around the parking lot (it was colder than we anticipated so we didn't walk far...):

Contrails made the evening sky pretty -- the building to the left, which is across the highway, is IU Health North Hospital, where Carl will have his surgery on Monday.

We had noticed these bikes in the parking lot so took a look to see what the deal was with them.

I guess they are rental bikes, but they aren't getting much use at this time of the year.

Another view of the sunset -- the Residence Inn is on the right, Springhill Suites is on the left, with a shared parking lot between.

On Saturday, it was a little warmer, and we went out a little earlier, so could take a little longer walk.

The Residence Inn has a small BBQ area and courtyard which, I think, in non-COVID times, might be used for evening get-togethers (when the weather is nice).

The hotel also has an indoor pool (but no hot tub)...

... and an exercise room.

We walked around behind the Residence Inn -- our room is on the back side of the building, on the parking lot of the building behind which is a medical building of some kind. There is a small lake between the buildings and the freeway, and there were a couple of ducks on it. The building in this picture is the IU Health North Hospital again.

I was specifically wanting to get a picture of the sign indicating that there was a traffic circle coming up on the road that the Residence Inn is on...

There are a LOT of traffic circles in Carmel. Whoever was the guy who got commissions for selling  them traffic circles is off in the islands somewhere retired on the profit he made on selling traffic circles here. We thought that it might just be our unfamiliarity with traffic circles that made it seem like they have a lot of them, but... we looked up information about the city today and found this on Wikipedia:

Though Carmel was home to one of the first electronic automated traffic signals in the state, the city has constructed some 128 roundabouts since 1998, earning its moniker as the "Roundabout Capital of the U.S."  ^{wikipedia: Carmel}

Today, Sunday, we were on our way to Lou Malnati's for a salad -- the restaurant is about a mile away, and we drove through 4+ traffic circles / roundabouts (8 round trip) -- the "+" is because one of them is a double circle on both sides of the entry/exits to the freeway:

Approaching the one at the freeway -- you may be able to discern that the car in front of us was in the rightmost lane (which has to enter the freeway) and decided at the last minute to change lanes to go through the circle.

At this one, in addition to the right turn lane, there are two lanes around the circle -- this is the case for most of the circles -- two lanes.

In the part under the freeway -- it is like a figure 8 except you can't drive through the middle of the 8 -- Maybe I should say it is like an elongated traffic circle with bulbous ends at each end.

For this next one, we wanted to turn left, so needed to be in the left lane entering the circle.

The last circle on the way in to the shopping center where the restaurant was located.

We safely made it to Lou's and back, traversing the multiple traffic circles, and thoroughly enjoyed our salad for lunch!

Carmel is an interesting town -- it looks like it has recently grown up -- we drove through an area that was made to look like an old downtown storefront area but they were obviously new buildings. I'm sure there was something here "before" but most of it is probably built in the last 40-50 years.