Blogs from Illinois, United States, North America - page 8

Two states down, eight to go! Wow! That sounds like I have barely started! Now that Kentucky is behind me,I must reflect: Sitting behind my handlebars, Kentucky was really two diverse regions. East of Berea, the Appalachian Mountain region dictated the severe up and downs, the hollows between the hills, and a lot of apparent poverty. This is coal country and our Nation’s movement away from Coal has devastated the Eastern Kentucky economy. West of Berea, Kentucky was flatter but never level, mostly grazing land and to the east it was mostly farm lands. I saw, hay, corn, soy beans and tobacco. It seems a ride on lawnmower is as ubiquitous as a dishwasher in these parts. Lawns are beautiful and freshly mowed everywhere in western Kentucky. If you are considering riding the Trans Am Bicycle ... read more

Oak Park, Illinois We drove into Chicago again for Joan’s last Chicago rebellion item - the Frank Lloyd Wright houses at Oak Park. Try as I could to come up with a train schedule from here in Indiana all the way across the big metropolitan area, nothing was going to work very well. Google said we were looking at a minimum 3 hour trip using public transportation. That was going to make for a very long day. So I ended up fueling up the car and we drove the entire 60 miles using the freeway system most of the way. As someone told us earlier in our trip, Chicago only has two seasons, winter and construction, so the highways were a mess with lots of orange barrels and signs. Our car GPS doesn’t know much about ... read more

Pullman National Monument, Pullman, Illinois There is just one bucket-list stop in Illinois. Yes, it has two historic sites - the Lincoln Home and the Chicago Portage - but I did not include Historic Sites in my bucket list because they are usually small and there are so many of them that it would mean a lot of additional traveling. (I’ve been admonished by real ‘Park collectors’ that you can’t claim to be one of them unless you do every single NPS site, but, alas, we’ve already missed so many of them that it would be nearly impossible to make them up anyway. So, my bucket list remains as is! And so there !) But there is a single National Monument in Illinois and we went there yesterday. It is located in a section of southern ... read more

Art Institute, Chicago, IL Joan is so much fun to travel with. So often she reacts like a kid in a candy shop when she is exposed to something new. She can completely lose herself when she reads a book or watches movies and I have to nudge her to get her attention. And so it was for most of yesterday. Joan is a city girl, of sorts. She was born and raised in Los Angelos and then spent the bulk of her life in Albuquerque. Albuquerque is a city of half-million (metro area) so counts as a city but not really a big one. Los Angelos is the second largest city in the country, but as we are all aware, L.A. grew up in the automobile age and is structured horizontally with freeways tying the ... read more

Wednesday – Friday, 7-9 March We did a farewell tour of Kirkwood on Wednesday and did The Wall one more time for good measure. I really like that run. Thursday was the farewell tour of Heavenly and a balmy 4C on the mountain so we finished the way we arrived – in warm weather. We finished early and ran around returning our skis and snow chains, as well as getting a couple of things fixed. We even got half back on our used skis so the whole thing only cost us A$150 for a month for both of us. Buying used was definitely the way to go. We left early on Friday morning so we had time to see the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, when we arrived it was a complete white out! Ocean fog had ... read more