Every old stone building in the American Midwest seems to have come from somewhere near Bedford. This is the middle of Indiana's limestone belt, a pale, fine-grained rock laid down in a warm shallow sea long before anything with a backbone walked out of it, and cut from the ground around here in quantities that built the Empire State Building, plenty of courthouses and a good share of Washington's monuments. The quarries still scar the hillsides outside town, and the flooded ones are the swimming holes that made the 1979 film Breaking Away feel so true to anyone who grew up in Lawrence County.
You arrive on gentle, rolling roads through hardwood country, oak and hickory and tulip poplar, with the Hoosier National Forest just to the south and west. The corners are not dramatic, but the surface is generally decent and the rhythm is relaxing: long easy bends, small farms, the odd limestone mill building gone quiet. Traffic is light away from the highway and the bigger risk is deer at dusk, so plan to be settled somewhere by then.
Bedford itself has about thirteen thousand people, so food, coffee and fuel are all easy, and the square and the streets around it are worth a slow lap on the bike for the stone alone. Oolitic, five kilometres away, is named after the kind of limestone, and it carries its quarrying history proudly with a small museum about the industry and its carvers. Mitchell, a bit further south, sits beside Spring Mill State Park, a restored pioneer village with a cave and a mill, and it is also the hometown of astronaut Gus Grissom.
If you only have time for one thing, make it a look at the stonework. Bedford has the unhurried feel of a place that knows its product is literally holding up the country, and it does not need to shout. Take a rest here, eat something decent, and let the road wind on south toward the Ohio River.