6th – 12th July 2019
Illinois. It is the 6th most populous state in the US, with about 12.7 million people living here. Of those about 25% live within the city of Chicago, the USA’s third largest, and overall 65% of the population live in the counties making up the Chicago metro area. Illinois is Chicago, is Illinois. This really annoys the rest of Illinois, which otherwise is made up of many smaller cities and towns and vast farms growing maize and soy. There is also a lot of industry and natural resources such as timber, coal and petroleum. The state has been described as a microcosm of the country as a whole.
We were heading slowly to the ‘Big Smoke’ for a weekend rendezvous with good friends and had a few stops on the way up through the state to fill some time. First stop, three nights in a small city called Peoria. This is located on the Illinois river and is home to about 115,000 people and the well known Caterpillar brand. The wide variety of various Caterpillar equipment, diggers, bulldozers and dump trucks are all still manufactured in the town and surrounds and the company employs a lot of these people. It even has a visitor centre where you can take your boys who are fans of all things yellow. The city is also associated with the phrase “Will it play in Peoria?”, which originited from the vaudeville era and was popularized by Groucho Marx.
Our camp was a municipal park with a small marina on the banks of the river. As it passes through the city the river widens into a long lake with a seperate shipping lane, creating a safe boating area. Our camp didn’t usually have a good swimming beach, but due to the heavy spring rains that have affected all of the mid-west, the river/lake had burst it banks which had flooded all the waterfront tent camp sites, creating a rather nice place to soak. It was, of course, still very hot. This park has a large seasonal population, folks who rent a site for the whole summer. Interestingly a lot of these people seemed to be reasonably local and had all been coming for years. This made for a really tight knit group of people who were all friends with each other (despite differing views on the current President), and they were also really friendly to us. In fact, I don’t think that we have stayed anywhere where we have got chatting with as many people. Thank you for making us feel so welcome!
As soon as we arrived we off-loaded Tin Can. A task performed in 90F heat whilst we were hungry, a bad combination for good humour and marital harmony. We needed Big Dave liberated for a few reasons. One being our impending attendance that evening at Peoria Speedway, our first motorsport event in America, and another was to sort out the tatty decal on the front of Tin Can, a victim of an overly powerful jet wash last trip.
We set out for the speedway at 4.30pm and as we pulled out of the park it was 102F. For crying out loud. We made our way across town to the Speedway Park and took our place in the car park along side rows and rows of other Chevy pick ups. Big Dave could hold his own in this company. I am not so sure that we blended in so well. It was redneck nirvana and we were looking a tad Hampsons in the Hamptons. Happily it was a friendly/unobservant crowd who were far more fixated on following the progress of the cars.
The course was a small banked oval which seemed to have a swamp in the centre. The cars and ‘pits’ were on one side and the ‘grandstand’ (three sets of bleachers) was on the other. There was a beer trailer, a food trailer, toilets and zero shade. The entrance booth sold ear plugs and safety glasses: a clue as to how close up and personal this experience was to be. After a hot 30 minute wait, made bearable by a cold beer, the cars came out. It was noisy, dirty and fabulous! Each race was about nine laps long with the skill all being in holding a dirt drift around each end curve. There were several classes of car, all looking like variations of Mad-Max-Motors. There were a few spin-offs, a collision or two but no major crashes. We had no idea what was what, who was who, or which was which and we loved it. We stayed for about two hours by which time we had seen about half the races, our ears were bleeding, our faces were covered in track dust and we were starving. There was a popular BBQ restaurant just around the corner which was calling us.
The next couple of days we kicked up our heels and bashed about town in Big Dave, a bit like ‘normal’ people. We visited shopping centres, auto parts stores, a car wash and, of course, the Caterpillar Visitor Centre. Here they had a mock up of CAT’s biggest machine, the 797 mining dumper truck. It was massive. These cost 5 million USD each and can carry 400 tons per load. There is a mine in Canada running 350 of them… Caterpillar is definitely helping to shape/mis-shape our planet.
There were diggers that you could sit in and some simulators to play on too. Harder than it looks to shift soil, I can tell you. It was very interesting, with exhibits on engineering and the history of the company, including the digging of the Panama Canal.
Our chore of this stay was to sort out that old decal. Synopsis: 1. Reverse Big Dave under the front of Tin Can so his bed acts as a work platform. 2. Wash off 27 kg of dead bugs from front of camper. 3. Rinse. 4. Peel off old decal in thousands of small fragments. 5. Spray glue remover and spend an hour wiping off tenacious glue. 6. Get new decal, line it up, apply to wet surface, remove air bubbles. 7. Stand back and admire work. 8. Do all this whilst fielding friendly comments from the nearby audience of several of the aforementioned locals who were watching the whole show from across the way in their easy chairs, beers in hand. Performance Art?! 9. Cool off afterwards with dunk in flooded river. During this stay Big Dave also got some new bulbs in his headlights. We don’t often drive at night, but when we do, we previously couldn’t really see where we are going. Now we can, which is better.
Next on our Illinois journey was a place called Starved Rock State Park, a small state park alongside the Illinois river. It is a very popular park and sees a lot of visitors from the Chicago area as it is close enough for a day trip. It had an ominously large carpark at the Visitors Centre but luckily we were here mid-week so it wasn’t too busy. There was a large rustic lodge hotel on site and our wooded campsite was about 2-3 miles away. We had three nights and two full days here. On day one, despite the heat, we cycled to the park trails and set out hiking. There are about 13 miles of trails, taking in numerous mediocre sights such as lookouts, rock promontories and small canyons, most of whose waterfalls are dry at this time year. We planned to do about half of the trails on the first day and the other half on the next. But oh, it was so hot and humid. I haven’t been so sweaty and enjoyed a hike so little for a while. I was all for bailing and going back to the air-conditioned lodge for an ice cream at the 2 mile mark, but in a rare turn of events, Nick encouraged me to keep going. I was so sure he’d be turned by the prospect of an ice-cream. By the time we got back home it was 2pm and we were very weary, hungry and grimy. Lunch and a shower were medicinal and thus commenced a very lazy afternoon which bled into the next day. There was no way that either of us were going back out there. We did manage to create a breakfast sandwich (see below) and cycle to the Lodge to sit in the cool and tap into their internet for an hour or so.
So rested and refreshed on Friday and before the influx of the weekend campers arrived from the city, we packed up and headed in the opposite direction, into the heart of Chicago.