Brownstown to Madison

Trip To Madison, IN
My wife and I took a motorcycle trip to Madison, IN in early June. This blog post is part of a series which presents each step of our journey. If you missed the beginning, the story starts here.

We left Story and rode on toward Brownstown.

IN-135 is a fine road, popular with the motorcyclists, which leads all the way to the south end of the state. We took IN-135 as far as Brownstown, IN.


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IN-135 featured sweepers and turns, and passed through small Indiana towns like Freetown. It emerged onto US-50, where we turned East and headed toward Brownstown. US-50 is more of a major highway -- and by that I mean boring. We stopped briefly to consult a map before continuing on.

Choosing a motorcycle road from a map is a bit of an art. Most of us motorcyclists don't like straight, boring, highways. We enjoy back roads, a little bit of scenery, and some twisting roads so that we can "get our lean on".

In choosing a route from Indianapolis to Madison, I knew the quickest way was also the most boring. A straight shot down I-65, then a short jaunt on US-31 south, followed by a long and straight shot down IN-7. Now IN-7 is a boring field-crosser for much of the way, but the last 30 miles into Madison it turns into sweepers and beautiful countryside, as the farm land gives way to rolling southern Indiana hills.

But I didn't want to be content to cross an hour of farmland; instead I plotted a course which I felt would maximize the backroad aspect of our trip. For this reason, we took IN-135 to Brownstown, and from there, travelled briefly on IN-39, followed by IN-256, east into Madison. I used google maps "terrain" view to try and separate the farmlands from the woodlands, and chose the more wooded route.


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I knew there was no way I could really go wrong coming into Madison. Get close enough to this river town and the roads would be picturesque and twisty.

However, I was a little disappointed in IN-256. It was a little too straight, and a bit of a mere field-crosser from Austin, IN until the Madison city limits.

All in all it was a good trip. We happily stretched what would have been boring, see-none-of-the-countryside interstate-bound two hour trip into something that took us about 6 hours - including stops. That's what I call a good ride.