Peoria

My confession: in 9 years (and a bit) in Illinois, I've so seldom ventured outside of Chicago that I haven't yet seen most of the larger regional centers, including the state capital, Springfield. This week I took a baby step forward, spending Thursday night in Peoria.

I can't comment on Peoria quite so much and favourably as I did on South Bend a couple of weeks ago. The weather, for one, was kind of lousy. Grey, wet, cool, misty. The city sits overlooking the Illinois River, yet the afternoon RAS and I arrived, we could barely tell there was a river below the bluffs. We did take a nice drive through a swanky neighbourhood, but given conditions, real estate porn shots weren't going to happen. We also left fairly quickly after our presentation Friday morning, so we didn't explore very far then either.

A few things I noted:

There are hills, landscape, texture, colour. I think on a crisp, clear fall day with the leaves turning, it must be gorgeous.

The downtown needs an infusion of life and businesses.


There are offices downtown, but few services and amenities. A metro area on 350,000 and no Starbucks (or other chain) in the downtown core? Odd, and on a morning when it was damp and cold and we really wanted coffee, it was more than just odd. It became a little desperate. We found a Starbucks up near Bradley University.


Driving there from Chicago is nicer than the drive to Urbana (and the stop for lunch at a smalltown BK was priceless for the self-serve soda fountain with suggested pop-food pairings). Not so flat, not so much a dull, straight landscape of corn fields (though, as you can see, we passed between cornfields coming and going).
Even on a gloomy day, it wasn't bad, perhaps because it was new to me and perhaps because I had RAS for company.

I hope to get back to Peoria one day, in fact. Always good to see the rest of the state. May it not take me until 2018 so to do!

roadtrip, Champaign-Urbana

I decided it would be fun to wake up and not fall back to sleep. I've just finished writing Monday's swim practice. I almost wish I had work here at home with me. Ah well, blogging will have to suffice.

I don't talk much about work on this blog, and I'm not going to get into it too much here either, but I will note that this was a work-related jaunt south. I had to deliver some rare books to our consortium in Champaign-Urbana (that's two cities, side-by-side, for the non-Illinoisians reading this). I could have done a Monday drive down, I know. Conrad has long wanted us to do this drive together, though, so that he could stop in with me at an antique shop in the little town of Paxton. Fiestaware, of course. Happily, the consortium was willing, as was my boss, and on an altogether sunny, pleasant, mild Saturday, we set out after swim practice.

Full disclosure: after 8 years in Chicago, I still know very little of the rest of the state. Heck, I barely know any of the suburbs. Outside of Chicagoland I've been to Bloomington-Normal once and to Champaign-Urbana about 4 times. That's it. Not even to the state capital, Springfield. I feel a little ashamed of that, I have to say.

We dropped off the books right on time, then drove through downtown Champaign in search of parking and a light lunch. I love college towns like that. They tend to have good services and amenities, they tend to have some attractive buildings and history,

and the campus types are all over the place. The coffee house we ended up in
may not have been the best food in town (we really have no idea), but it was crammed full of younger folk on laptops and earnest-looking grad students. Love it. And I'm not mocking. It's a comfortable setting for me. Hmmmm... should I do a PhD one day?

Onward, back to Chicago. If you've never seen Illinois, understand that it's darn flat. In BC we think, "Ho-hum, another mountain, another tree". In Illinois, the cornfields stretch to the horizon, and there's little change in the landscape otherwise. I drove a spell, and took us into Paxton. Alas, the shop was gone. We stopped in at the Carnegie library and inquired, but all they could do was try the number in the book for us.

Undaunted, we drove on and exited for Gilman.
On the way down, Conrad had seen some old coal elevators and wanted to look at the structures a little more closely. As we passed through Gilman, we came upon a little antique mall that was open. No Fiestaware (and only two pieces of Russel Wright, neither of which we need), but a fun 15 minutes of browsing. We shortly after came about as close to the elevators as we figured we could: the local cemetery. The sun was getting lower in the sky, the shadows from the gravestones, monuments, and trees were lengthening.


Some photos there, then back in the car and bound for home.
The sun set on our trip through the cornfields downstate.