On the way home from Wisconsin, we stayed a night in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, close to where we lived for 18 years. We got a surprisingly good rate on a room at a new and fancy Hampton Inn in Deer Park. On Saturday evening, we connected with old friends at Giordano’s Pizza. On Sunday, my wife went to our old church with a friend while I went birding.
My first stop was a random road in Lake County where European Goldfinches have taken up residence after being released in the area. If they were around seven years ago when I lived here, I never heard about it. But more on that at the bottom of this post.
I drove to Moraine Hills State Park and walked the trails. I was getting ready to leave when I met another birder. We got to chatting, and he asked my name. When I told him, he got all excited — he’d seen my name on eBird and knew of me. When he told me his name, I knew of him too — he’s the guy who’s been passing me in number of birds seen at all the local spots. He’s a lot more passionate about birding than I was when I lived in Cary. I even quit listing for five years or so and only started again when I moved to Colorado and discovered eBird. Anyway, he took my photo (“to remember what you look like”), and we chatted for about 45 minutes.
The colors at Moraine Hills were close to peak.
The other birder told me that Red Crossbills were being seen at a park in Crystal Lake. I headed over and birded there for about an hour, but didn’t see them. I drove past our old house in Oakwood Hills. The people who bought it from us foreclosed a year or so later, and last time I saw it, it was abandoned and looking pretty shabby. Whoever lives there now has got it looking nice again and has even done some work on the driveway and retaining wall that we couldn’t afford to do. I never cared for the house, but it’s nice to see it taken care of.
When we lived there, the address wouldn’t show up on any mapping software (the street name had recently been changed from Tip Top Lane to Lake Shore Drive). Friends and pizza delivery guys used to get lost all the time. We began telling people to pay no attention to street signs but to turn left by the red pickup. The pickup is still there, 18 years after we moved out, and it’s still in the same shape.
Our Cary house is a different story. The current owners have put solar panels on the roof and a library-on-a-stick in the yard, but the yard looks like trash and the gardens haven’t been kept up at all. I had that place looking sharp, so that’s kinda sad.
Two more bits of sadness. The Einstein Bros. in Barrington no longer sells bagel dogs. And the Catlow, while still there, is closed. Baloney’s is also gone.
I got a Chicago-style hot dog at a stand on Route 14 and spent a little while at another of my old birding haunts, Baker’s Lake. I picked up my wife at a restaurant near church at 3:00, and we headed south to Lincoln. The Hampton Inn there was old and in need of updating. The woman told me $154 for the night, but when I expressed my disappointment with that price, she called another hotel across the road and asked their rate. Then she looked at me and said, “I’ll match it. $104. So that was nice.
On Monday, we drove the rest of the way home, stopping at a couple places in an unsuccessful attempt to see a Eurasian Tree Sparrow. We got home around 5:00 after a slow-paced but pleasant 10-day vacation.