The day began oddly. As I we checking out at the Hampton Inn, the clerk saw where I was from and said, “Wow, you’re a long way from home. Did you drive?” I said “yes.” I thought it was an odd question. For starters, we were only eight hours away from home, which isn’t that far, and I’m not sure how else we could have gotten there. My “yes” was said in a voice that meant “I’m not sure why this surprises you since you work in a hotel and see people from out of state all the time. Can you expand on your question.” The clerk must have thought my “yes” meant, “You are a world-class moron.” He gave me a curt “Fine, then,” and wouldn’t speak to me again. It was Macomb, after all. Perhaps he confused Arkansas with Alaska or Albania or something. After a quick breakfast at the hotel, we took off.
We had four goals today.
- Get from Macomb, Illinois to Ogden Dunes, Indiana.
- Travel through Mercer and Stark Counties, the two counties in Illinois I’d not been in.
- Avoid all Illinois toll roads. Some backstory here: In 2023, we traveled up to Wisconsin and returned through Illinois, visiting some of our old haunts and old friends in Chicagoland. Along the way, we drove on toll roads. You can no longer pay on the road but have to go online when you get home to pay the tolls. The Illinois government site says that it can take as long as two weeks for your tolls to appear on the site. We checked several times and never found them. We even took a screen shot of the page to show that they weren’t there. Then we got a bill in the mail for our tolls and a hefty fine for not paying them within two weeks. We sent the screen shot in to prove that we couldn’t pay them and were told that wasn’t sufficient evidence and we had to pay the fine. There may have been a 12 minute window after the tolls showed up on the site and before we were fined, I don’t know. The entire thing a perfect example of the rampant corruption and incompetence that battle for preeminence in the state. We vowed that we would never give the Illinois Tollway another penny of our money.
- Avoid the stretch of I-80-94 across Northern Indiana where the road is 12 lanes wide and packed with trucks, many of which are pulling two or even three trailors.
All of that means that we would be taking a lot of backroads. At first this was fine—Mercer and Stark counties are out of the way, which is why I’d never been in either before, but we checked them off early in the morning. The entire rest of the drive consisted of going east for a few miles, then north for a few miles, then east for a few miles, then north for a few miles, with a few southward jogs now and again. We were on roads so obscure that we didn’t find a place to eat lunch until we got to Crown Point, Indiana at around 2:30.
Our hotel was called Al & Sally’s Hotel in Town of Pines, about 20 minutes east of my nieces house. We had to make that 20-minute drive several times over the next two-and-a-half days, but most of it was through pretty Fall woods, so we didn’t mind.
The hotel looked cute on the outside and advertised itself as vintage. We soon discerned that “vintage” was code for “we don’t feel like upgrading but we don’t mind charging a lot.”
Not to complain, but …
- The curtains were thin and let in a great deal of light. They were also not wide enough to cover the window so we had to find various ways to stretch them and hold them in place.
- There were no chairs in the room except four very small, uncomfortable wooden ones around the tiny table.
- The bathroom was in serious need of upgrading, especially in the tub. Various ceramic and plastic parts of not-longer-existing towel racks and soap dispensers jutted out so that we were constantly bumping them. Also, the tile hadn’t been grouted in a long time and the room smelled very musty.
- There was no way to adjust the volume on the TV, which was loud.
- Only half the lights in the room worked, and there was no overhead light.
- The mattresses were hard and lumpy from who-knows-how-many previous renters, and we both had very sore backs after our three nights there.
On Friday evening, we drove to my niece’s house in Odgen Dunes and hung with family, which was very enjoyable.
On Saturday morning, I abandoned my wife to a morning with no place to sit and went birding. I had a good time, although October birding in Northern Indiana is a lot like winter birding in Arkansas. I was hoping to see Mute Swans, Black-capped Chickadees, and American Black Ducks. I never saw the Mute Swans this trip. I did see a pair of Trumpeter Swans and a small flock (17 I think) of Sandhill Cranes (which are rare in Arkansas).
By mid-morning, I was feeling guilty about my wife, so I went back to the hotel and suggested an adventure. We drove around on backroads looking at foliage for awhile, then drove along Lake Michigan. We stopped at a gift shop and ate lunch at Joe’s Bread, where my great-niece and great-nephew both work. They weren’t there that day, but the food was good.
We were back at the hotel with a couple hours to kill, so I walked across the railroad tracks behind the building to a bike trail in Indiana Dunes National Park.
The wedding was at a small, pretty church in Odgen Dunes at 3:00. We saw some shirttail relatives we hadn’t seen since moving from Illinois nine years ago. The reception was at a yacht club nearby. We sat with family and had a good time.
On Sunday, we hung with our niece and her husband, our nephew and his wife, and various assortments of great-nieces and great-nephews who came and went. We hung around the house for a while, then drove to Town of Pines to Joe & Freddy’s for lunch. We walked a marsh trail, then along the Beverly Shores beach, then went back to the house to eat Pizzaria Uno and watch the Packers/Steelers game. The family hadn’t been all together like this since my sister died in 2020, so it was nice to see everyone.
We left our hotel at 7:30 on Monday and drove all the way home, again avoid I-80-94 and Illinois toll roads. We ate lunch at Culver’s in Effingham, Illinois. In keeping with a tradition we started years and years ago, my wife did the driving through Missouri while I handled Illinois and Arkansas. We got home at 7:40 p.m. and a few days later came down with a virus that seems like some variety of COVID, but it was a successful vacation and we loved spending time with my family.