I have no idea why, but I can't get the hotel WiFi to work, and even my phone's hot spot won't work, which is really weird, so I'm actually writing this on Travalon's Chromebook. This means all the awesome photos we took today will have to wait for another day, but at least I can write something.
This morning I woke up from a weird dream where I was trying to find a video that had been taken off the internet, and then I was walking down State Street with Tiffy and we saw a flying fish fly by. "That's weird," I said, "we're not anywhere near the ocean," and then we saw all sorts of other sea creatures blowing by in the wind... and then I woke up.
Travalon and I got on the road about 10:30 and didn't hit any bad weather at all. As we drove along, my regular readers will be stunned to know that I needed to make a pit stop. We were right outside of Rockford, and when we took the first exit we came to, we were heading right toward the Hard Rock Casino. Now they have Hard Rock Cafes in major cities all over the world, like Tokyo and Rio and Bangkok and Dubai and Sydney and London and New York... and now Rockford? The only thing rock-worthy to come from there is the band Cheap Trick, and Travalon doesn't like them, although to me they sound just the same as a lot of the other classic rock he likes. Anyway, he'd been hoping to see it, so here was our chance! He lost a dollar in the slots while I used the very nice bathroom, where a woman asked me all sorts of questions about my Third Eye toque. She asked if it were good luck, and I said, "It means you're aware," but I should have added, "of a deeper reality." Then Travalon and I went to the gift shop, and he got a T-shirt, but of course the only things I liked were jewelry and purses that were over $200, so I didn't get anything. It seems weird to get fine jewelry at a Hard Rock Cafe, but man, some of it sure was beautiful!
Our next stop was the Railroad Park in Rochelle. It's a little park with a museum (only open Wednesday-Saturday), public bathrooms that thankfully were open, a gazebo, and a picnic pavilion, all between two sets of railroad tracks. It's the junction of two major railroad lines, so trains are running through all the time, and we saw three just in our short time there. Travalon made some videos, which I probably won't be able to post until we get back home. Let me tell you, this place is paradise for train fans, and it's only an hour and a half away from Madtown, so we will be back at some point.
Our next stop was the Uptown Grill in LaSalle, which I have written about before. We stop there every time we go by, and we always get the parmesan-encrusted whitefish with lemon butter and capers. They also have a delicious bread basket with a slice of French bread, a slice of focaccia, and a fancy cracker for each of us, and I had what was basically fancy succotash for my side, while Travalon had garlic mashed potatoes. Then we split their dark chocolate brownie for dessert. This place never disappoints!
Once we arrived in Springfield, we went to our hotel and unloaded everything, including my family heirloom mandolin and an amaryllis someone had abandoned at a rest stop. (I think they didn't realize amaryllis go dormant, so they massively overwatered it and then left it on top of a vending machine - we'll see if it can recover.) Then we went to downtown Springfield and started at the Lincoln Home Historic Site, which was not open at that hour, and we walked to the old Capitol Building. We saw Christmas lights and heard a train with a horn so loud that it sounded like a pipe organ playing a crashing chord. Then we went to the Lincoln depot, which is where he left from for his inauguration, and we heard another train coming, but it was several blocks away, and it had that loud horn too. The ones in Rochelle just had a regular train horn, but the train we saw in Springfield was an Amtrak passenger train, so maybe that's the difference. We also saw a tall, ugly cylinder of a building, and I wanted to see what it was. Travalon said it was a hotel he was going to book us at because it overlooks the Capitol (the new one) (maybe both), but it had a bunch of one-star reviews that the WiFi didn't work, the heat didn't work, the hot water didn't work, the elevators didn't work, the restaurant was always closed, the pool was closed, etc. so he chose our current hotel on the edge of town. He said the manager replied to the bad reviews by saying that if more people stayed there, he could afford to fix all those issues. Indeed, it did look like not too many people were staying there. We went in so I could use the bathroom, and nobody was at the check-in desk. (Oh yeah, the reviewers said the staff were rude too.) I felt bad, since it's a vicious cycle: the more bad reviews they get, the less people stay there. But this is not my fault, nor is it my problem, so I just have to let it go. More than one person said the building makes a weird sound in the wind, which would keep me up at night wondering if the building were going to collapse, so I'm really glad we didn't stay there.
We went to a local restaurant called Abe's Hideout for a light dinner after that big lunch, and they were showing the Packer game, so that was perfect. The Packers were beating up on the scoreless Saints, so it wasn't an exciting game to watch. I brought half my flatbread back to the hotel because we have a fridge in the room, unlike that much-maligned hotel downtown. Then we went swimming, but the pool was far too small to swim laps, and there was no hot tub, so we didn't spend a lot of time there. I did say nothing had really gone wrong for us today... and then I had these internet connectivity issues. At least Travalon was able to get on the internet, with help from the front desk guy. I'll post photos soon.
Famous Hat
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