Metamora & Brookville — The Whitewater Canal, a Horse-Drawn Boat & Brookville Lake

About seventy-five minutes southeast of Indianapolis, the little town of Metamora is a survivor of Indiana's canal age — a nineteenth-century mill village strung along the restored Whitewater Canal, one of the very few places in the country where you can still ride a horse-drawn canal boat and watch a working aqueduct carry the canal over a river. This relaxed day wanders Metamora's clustered shops and gristmill, takes the leisurely boat ride behind a team of draft horses, then follows the Whitewater River valley up to Brookville and the broad blue expanse of Brookville Lake for an afternoon by the water. It is a day of slow water, old machinery, and country roads — an easy step back into the pace of the 1840s.