exit 670 » Travel

Make It Four

Peter Stork — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:22:12 +0000

Four walks in a row now the Canadian National freight line has forced me to wait

This time I crossed the tracks eastbound and saw the light of the engine coming from the north. Two hopes abounded: that I could loop through downtown quick enough to return before its crossing (since you can see several to a few miles north on the laser-straight tracks here) or that it would come quickly and complete its obstruction before I came back to the tracks.

It took its sweet time and blocked the sidewalk only a minute before my arrival. Of course I could change my route slightly to go under the viaduct a block south, but I’m just too obstinate. And that’s where all the freaks are at late at night anyway. Sure.

Three Conductors, and All of Them Hate Me

Peter Stork — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:02:31 +0000

Growing up in Sparta, as I would lay in bed at night I could hear the trains roaring by along the Illinois Central tracks a mile to the south, and my overactive genius kindergartner’s imagination convinced me that the horns sounding as they flew over their intersection with Route 4 was the claxon of the Monster Truck going street-by-street to deliver all of the overnight monsters at the homes of Sparta’s children. I was less frightened by this idea than impressed with the precision the monsters used to dispatch the horror-bringers.

So I like hearing trains at night. It’s a comforting sound as the warning wail and the shudder of the tracks echoes through the silent city.

But I’m getting damned tired of the trains in Effingham.

I like to walk. Specifically I like to walk at night, often when Emily’s gone to bed and I can grab my ancient iPod Shuffle and bask in my peaceful constitutional. Effingham can be quite the quiet small town at night, and the busy stop-free intersections that tangle up pedestrians in the daylight offer easy passage under the watch of the stars, which all twinkle brighter than expected due to the small number of streetlights present in the town’s mostly safe neighborhoods. I stroll through newer friendly neighborhoods, past Saint Anthony’s hospital and along the classic downtown dotted with cute shops and the incredibly tasty Italian subs at Joe’s Pizza. Yum.

The Rocketeer release But on the west end of downtown I have to cross the Canadian National rail line.

This is the trail made famous in Steve Goodman’s tune City of New Orleans, and while the Amtrak cars fly quickly through town several times a day, smiling and tipping their cap as they hurry to get out of our way, it’s the long, plodding CN freight line that causes me ill. I can depart from our apartment, a good three miles northwest of the crossing, and hear the horn of a train beginning to violate my future path. No problem; it’s a good half-hour before I’m scheduled to be there, and this lumbering monster will by then be long gone.

By the time that thirty minutes is up, another train is already running through.

Every train in the world, it seems, passes through The Giant Truck Stop, and thus this happens far too often. This week in particular I took walks three days in a row at different times (6:00 PM, 11 PM, 10 PM) and each night I stood – twice on the east side, once on the west – waiting for the entire train to pass through.

Each time the train waited until I was approaching the crossing to storm through, timing its appearance perfectly so that I was just far enough to be unable to run across yet close enough to have to stand and wait from engine to caboose.

The Limits of Control

Every damn night.

Now I lie in bed at night and hear the trains passing by miles away, laughing at me.

I curse them.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;Rain&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039; on a Sunny Day

Peter Stork — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:30:24 +0000

Emily and I spent the weekend in the Mound City with crafts and minstrels.

Saturday we cruised to Kimmswick, a small village south of the city along the Mississippi River. Many early homes and buildings have been preserved, and the historic town serves a mini craft and antique mall. Mother and I had not been together for many a year, so we took my wife to revel in the treasures. She walked away with a bracelet made of soda bottle caps (Northern Illinois Translation Don’t Say a Word the movie

: “pop bottle caps”) that is quite fetching, particularly due to the presence of a Ski cap.

The main reason behind our trip downstate was a Christmas present from my mother: tickets to the Beatles tribute band “Rain” at the Fox

on Sunday. Previously we saw American English in Hillsboro (pictures @ Facebook The Bucket List download ) and Downers Grove, and Emily caught both British Export and the Classical Mystery Tour without her boy, but this was a chance to see yet another group – and one that boasted to have some of the best production values of all the various troupes.

While it was an excellent show, the group couldn’t touch the quality of American English. The production values were top notch as advertised, with video boards showing clips and classic commercials to fill the gaps during the four quick costume changes, and the giant screen behind the band added visuals that supported the music quite well (along with showing mocked versions of album covers featuring the members of the modern cover band.) Playing mostly mainstream hits, though, the band’s voices couldn’t match the authenticity found with American English (especially with Paul) even if the instrumentation was quite accurate. A very good show, just not what AE can provide, and the playlist was far too limited

Lots and lots of pictures from the show: Facebook

| Flickr

The Snows of Kilimanjaro trailer

So This Is What Warm Feels Like

Peter Stork — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:25:44 +0000

Stormbreaker trailer 70 degrees on Sunday, March 2. Yeah, we’re going outside.

Vipers full

Trippin’ ipod

Emily and I had been to Ballard Nature Centre It’s Alive divx , this quaint private preserve along the Old National Road/US 40 just a few minutes west of Effingham back in the fall, and with the onset of the cold Central Illinois winter had not been able to venture out since. The past couple Januarys had given us ample warm times to explore, notably in Giant City State Park

Hobgoblins 2 rip

near Carbondale and the Garden of the Gods down in southeast Illinois, but this year had not yet cooperated. It was cold.

And. It. Would. Not. Stop. SNOWING.

Today was fabulous, though, and we ventured out, spending just over an hour hiking the soft, soggy trails through the restored prairies and woods, lugging my dSLR all the while. Rain is on the way – and yes, of course, snow – and a high of 32 degrees in the middle of the week. Thanks for the brief respite, Mother Nature…short as it was.

Facebook Album | Flickr Album

Girl Happy trailer

Outside

Peter Stork — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:07:54 +0000

It snowed today in Effingham – again – making going out of doors rather trecherous.

Well, that and The Decatur Smell.

Diamond Dawgs ipod Decatur, home to ADM and its many industrial plans, always smells horrid. Like a concentrated ball of rotten McDonald’s french fries, and so strong you can almost taste it. It’s a horrible hanging scent that makes you gag, especially while traveling US 36 through the central and eastern parts of the city.

Usually the smell is confined to the Decatur city limits, but the Cloud occasionally rides the wind to other communities. One evening back in December I first caught a whiff of The Decatur Smell in the parking lot of Effingham’s Martin’s IGA, over sixty miles by air from ADM’s headquarters. I’d been to Decatur that day and fought the scent head-on, so I figured it to be a residual phantom smell until Emily also noticed the hanging ill and we promptly decided I had inadvertently shown The Smell a new community to haunt.

Holy Man trailer After that The Smell remained absent from our quaint town for all of 2008…until I went out for lunch today and got a potent dosage right in the face. Nice to know – at least this time – I’m not responsible for the foul odor.

All the Pretty Horses movie download

(To be honest, that last line sums up my life quite well.)

Closed?

Peter Stork — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:21:11 +0000

Today Emily and I drove three hours through fog and rain just to eat good pizza…and the place was closed.

Connie’s in Anna isn’t just another pizza place. We discovered the tiny diner tucked into the corner of Anna’s downtown stretch thanks to the Vienna Beef sign hanging proudly in the window, and as tentative as I usually am to sample new cuisine I jumped at the chance to CHOMP a Chicago Dog this deep in Southern Illinois. We weren’t disappointed, not by the quality of the hot dogs or the rest of the offbeat, diverse menu featuring lots of food really bad for you but damn, damn good. Nor by the unique ambiance, as the proprieter had dressed her restaurant by quickly redressing the old downtown store with a multitude of old food signs, maps and other appropriate oddities, not to mention the small board games throughout the restaurant to help make our wait for eats a little less tedious. After a few months she added pizza to the menu (once passing out samples – and by that I mean entire pieces) and we were addicted.

The Misfits video Then we had to get married and move away. Silly us.

In Her Shoes the movie Hunger film Today we returned for the first time since May and the lights were off, denying us our treats.

Admittedly, I use the word “just” to lie to you: the pizza was only part of the equation. Emily wanted to tour more of the region of Illinois she’s been assigned to survey as part of her new job, and while we were heading to the south we planned to swing by Carbondale so she could pick up some needed materials to work on her grad school research. After that it would only be a half-hour trip south to Anna and the delicacies we missed so much, and since Sunday is the day Connie’s was usually closed we pushed back our planned Sunday trip to a Monday in order to be able to kill a bunch of red-tailed hawks with one 65 MPH stone.

Instead we had to settle for O’Charley’s in Marion, a fine meal but hardly the same. And it’s one we get in Champaign or Springfield any day of the week. Still, the trip to Carbondale had some rewards:

That’s right: one day after I finish the new blog design I purchase legal copies of Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3. I despise software piracy, and now I no longer have to be such a hypocrite. Even if I am a hungry boy.

Bustin’ Down the Door hd The Big Red One rip

North to Alaska buy

The Honeymoon

Peter Stork — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 04:03:17 +0000

The Wife and I headed through Wisconsin and Michigan for our honeymoon, and there’s literally about 500 to 600 pictures. Not all of those will make the Facebooks, but plenty will come soon. Until then, some fun details and a few pictures.

What follows is over 2800 words long, and it’s much easier – and entertaining – to take in the audio version. Download the MP3 and listen to all sixteen minutes of the following; trust me, it’s far better than I make it sound. The file is about 15 MB, which for anyone with broadband should take five to ten minutes to download at the very most. Dial-up need not apply (it will take an hour and a half or so.) As I said, it’s an .mp3, so it’ll play in any major audio player. Even Windows Media Player – ugh.

*****

By far, the most important thing for the hot tub novice to remember is that the water level in the tub needs to be at least several inches above the top of the jets before you flip the switch to enable them. Otherwise, anything that lies directly in the path of one of the jets, such as a laptop, camcorder, digital SLR, a hotel television and a hotel electrical outlet, might end up soaked and just barely escape being permanently disabled by sudden, extreme water damage.

Just a word of warning.

Otherwise, having a hot tub in your hotel room is something I’d highly recommend.

The Lake Michigan Circle Tour purports to be a scenic drive, but would be better classified as a four state wide treasure hunt. Long stretches of the road deviate from the lakefront, following either generic six-lane interstates or lonely, secluded US highways that offer a better view of hundreds of green and white British Petroleum signs than the deep blue waters of the Lake. Even better, these far off roads are rarely signed with the green Circle Tour logo, leaving motorists to occasionally wonder, “Did I miss a turn? Thirty miles back?” It seems the only time the various Departments of Transportation feel the need to sign the Tour regularly is either when the drive turns onto another road or when you’re within a stone’s throw of the Lake and such reassurance is hardly necessary.

When you can see the signs – and thus, the Lake – it is a magnificent cruise, well worth the time lost detouring away from the water. With air some ten degrees cooler than back on the unsigned portions of the Tour, the windows come down, the oldies music goes up and it is simply utter bliss. Utter bliss and a lot of seagulls.

Perhaps, though, they that decide these things might be on to something. After all, wouldn’t it get old? Upon first sight the lake is wonderful, its contrast with the concrete and commercialism that dots most of your drive, and especially the peaceful lull of the waves and the feeling of the cold air inviting you to throw off your cloth and embrace its calming, if chilling, power. After a few miles, though, it’s still the Lake and the grim reality starts to set in that this water goes on for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and though there is oxymoronic beauty in the combination of its constancy and in the subtle differences that each region brings to the natural wonder, in your eyes right now it is still. just. a. lake.

Maybe you need a break every so often, even if it consists of begging Interstate 43 to give you that Dairy Queen sign so the alphabet game can move on to the letter P. By the time the Circle Tour winds back to the Lake your gasp tank will be refilled and you’ll be truly be ready for the same old astonishing beauty all over again.

I can understand the reluctance of someone who has relaxed in nothing but the chlorination of the suburban in-ground pool their whole life to sacrifice their body to the dirt and grime of a natural body of water, but for someone like me who grew up swimming in the crud and crap of a rural family pond, any aversion to the northern Great Lakes is puzzling. Fearing Lake Michigan at Chicago is understandable; the pollution that laps up against the lakeshore around the museum campus has mutative properties that could fuel a thousand Marvel titles. Michigan has none of this sludge, though. Just a lot of algae. Algae I can handle. I guess.

When you’ve spent all of your life shackled to the chains that are the Land of Lincoln, the amount of shallow water in the Great Lakes shocks you upon discovery. Bodies of water in Illinois usually take the form of a steep bowl, with a quick descent from the shore into the depths. Stepping into Lake Michigan at its most northern points, you find not only remarkably clear water but also the ability to wade out several hundred feet before the Lake rises up past your waist. This makes swimming impractical, but you find doggy paddling with your fingers touching the sand while you desperately try to stay under the water’s surface in order to avoid the chill June winds quite easy. God help those who brave Lake Superior.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore lines the southern border of Lake Superior in Northern Michigan – in the U.P. to be shore [sic] – and its as if God decided to build Six Flags Upper Peninsula and assemble every natural feature he could think of in a forty-mile stretch. Beaches! Waterfalls! Giant colored rock formations! Marshes! Forests! Spending just the afternoon is a crime, as every hike brings you upon another marvel and draws you further and further into this greatest hits collection of natural wonders. This water, lapping up from the bottom of a lake larger than Scotland or South Carolina (thank you, Wikipedia) is remarkably clear and – I cannot stress enough in this writing – breathtaking. The combination of the Superior blues and greens with the light brown rocks and cliffs of the shoreline has a Caribbean attitude to it that betrays its Michigan homestead, forcing you to question why anyone would spend thousands to visit the waters of the Pacific when for so little one can spend time here in the cool breeze of the Great Lakes, relaxing and swimming and taking in this spectacular landscape, especially when such diversity can be found in the forests and hills just a mile or two inland.

Having never visited the waters of the Pacific, maybe I should shut up.

Travel an hour south through the lowly populated woods of the U.P. and you’ll find the Big Spring, so named because there’s a big spring. I know. The cliche “this has to be seen to be believed” is true here, as video and picture cannot capture the awesomeness – I use that term literally – as you look down upon forty-five feet of completely clear water and watch ten thousand gallons of liquid pour in from the floor of the small lake disrupting the school of giant fish that inhabit it. Save a drop of rain here and there, all the water in this body comes from the spring, ensuring an amazingly clean lake that, even after you’ve viewed the clear waters of northern Lake Michigan, comes as a shock to you. Eight bucks to get in; worth every penny.

Hiking on sand sucks, okay? Wear sandals, as I never do, and your ability to walk a mile and a half is non-existent. Wear tennis shoes, as I did, and the gait you carry on your trek is a mix of “let’s move as fast as we can to get out of this heat” and “shit, I got more sand in my shoes. Ugh.” Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was named for a sand dune that once (dunes change over time, but only when wind blows off the lake. So make that every day) looked like a sleeping bear but now looks like a large clump of sand. Which is what it is. Ten dollars admission gets you a view of virgin sand, collected by the elements and untouched, for the most part, by man as small reeds grow up through it in an attempt to see Mr. Sun. To be sure, it’s actually far more beautiful than I can describe it.

Even near the eastern shores of the Lake it remains hot as the sun bears down upon the sand and reflects the heat up at your face as you imagine this is what it feels like to be lost and wandering hopelessly through a desert (if only the desert was about forty degrees cooler and there was a clearly marked trail. And a remarkable view of a Great Lake.)

Off the trail and closer to the Lake you can walk out on a boardwalk to view the dunes that dot the shorelines as well as the four-hundred foot slide from the cliffs to the water. The fun of this drop is that man could easily survive it; the grade is precarious but not necessarily fatal, and though one would not enjoy the trip it would be more of a roll than a fall and therefore gravity could take little toll upon your body. What would be less possible is the climb back to the top as you traverse the few hundred feet of steep sand with no rest in sight. Many signs warn you of this stark fate, but that didn’t stop the children of an idiot control freak mother from Wisconsin of testing the border between the boardwalk and the slope. Go ahead, kids. The world needs fewer mouths to feed.

One of the best ways to get odd stares in Northern Michigan is to attend a Traverse City Beach Bums baseball game. In their second year, the novelty hasn’t worn off yet for this Class A independent team and they draw almost five thousand fans a game, second in the Frontier League to the Southern Illinois Miners. It helps to have such a beautiful stadium, with the concourse area designed like a beach house to honor the lakefront that makes Traverse City Michigan’s second most popular tourist destination behind the Mackinac area. Umbrellas and bleach white beach chairs crowd around concession areas, while the light blue walls with their white roof peaks that rise up above the grandstand and support the press and luxury boxes help sell the idea of the ballpark as yet another beach getaway in this resort town. Amidst the usual cookie cutter nature of most cute little minor league parks, this one stands out as something rarely seen – original.

I should clarify something. No one will give you those odd stares if you merely visit the wonderful facility to partake in a ballgame. Instead, you should be sure to wear a Saint Louis Cardinals jersey, particularly within a year of that team defeating the Detroit Tigers in the World Series since, after all, Traverse City is very much Tigers country. It also helps if the game you attend is one where the Gateway Grizzlies are the visiting team, since they’re the Frontier League club you root for, and you can wear your Grizzlies hat and be literally the only person in the stadium clapping and cheering for the visitors, not a common sight at all in non-affiliated Minor League Baseball.

Then when your team loses seven to two, run immediately across the street to Culvers to drown your sorrows in a custard sundae.

Baseball games on your honeymoon is yes. Baseball park tours on your honeymoon is apparently no.

Miller Park is larger than you’d expect, with the usual height of a modern ballpark dwarfed by the large spaceship residing on top that occasionally closes its cargo doors allowing no rain to fall upon the field while the baseballers play. Residing away from downtown in a field of concrete, the structure would frighten time travelers from the fifties into thinking the Martians had declared war on America by crushing the Polo Grounds.

Inside it is a rather average stadium, and the Wife and I endeavored to step onto its natural grass and sit where manager Phil Garner once sat before he became an idiot and lost the 2006 All-Star Game for the National League by leaving Miguel Cabrera in to play “defense” in the ninth. Alas, his stupidity had spread north from Houston and there was no tour guide for our 10:30 trip, just a promise that we could take a tour, gratis, at 1:30. With bigger, more successful Dairy State fish to fry, we moved on, robbed of our ability to rob Prince Fielder of his batting gloves.

The Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field was more accommodating, with two tour guides ready to show us the luxury boxes and bleachers of a stadium you can’t usually see the inside of unless you inherit tickets or take this tour. Renovations of the turf prohibited us from exiting the tunnel and walking onto the field, but it wouldn’t have been the same as at Miller Park anyway. Curse ye Brew Crew and your lackluster preparedness.

Swimming on your honeymoon can be anti-climactic when the best pool you wade into is the one you spend time the morning before the wedding.

Pools are so shallow these days; are we turning into a nation of midgets? Before the wedding, relaxation was found at the Best Western in a mammoth pool featuring six foot deep water, allowing your writer to actually, you know, swim. None of the hotels on the honeymoon would feature water deeper than five feet, though, and some had even less. On the flip side, the future stops would feature hot tubs not frequented by jailbait in way too small bikinis, making your author highly uncomfortable.

On his wedding day.

You might think that the cheaper the hotel the worse the pool, and for the most part you’d be right. Motel 6 in Traverse City has a small and quite over-chlorinated pool, tempting you to dress in all your dirty whites before entering the water in order to save some quarters on laundry. While you’re at it, bring your supper dishes into the hot tub; the mass of suds bubbling up completely obscures the water, and an uninformed visitor might confuse the hole for the destination of a bus boy in the middle of his shift. All this trumps the cheaper Motel 6 in Milwaukee, though, which sticks its smaller pool outside along the Wisconsin state route bringing travelers from the airport, all of them gawking at your shivering body’s attempt to avoid the masses of leaves and crud floating in the poorly maintained four-foot-deep-at-the-deep-end water. This might be why we skipped this pool.

Bump up the bucks to the AmericInn in Menominee, Michigan and you get a perfect hot tub and pool combo complete with adult swim between ten and midnight. Go up too high, though, and you’ll find yourself without a pool altogether, as with the Holiday Inn along the lakefront of Manistique, Michigan. Popular opinion would deduce that a hotel so close to the crisp, clear northern shores of Lake Michigan would not require a pool, but that didn’t stop the AmericInn, which is even closer to the lake than the Holiday Inn, since no US highway lies between its doors and the blue water. Just forty feet, in fact. So take that, Holiday Inn Manistique and your free popcorn and in-room hot tub. And your Big Boy. And Hardees with forty-nine cent roast beef.

There are only two Wal-Marts within one-hundred miles of Manistique, Michigan, and this Upper Peninsulan town shows it. Even with an economy based primarily on tourism, the two block long downtown stretch shows signs of life rarely seen in most Midwestern towns of its size. Partially obscured from most of the Fudgies flying by on US Highway 2, the strip features several mom-and-pop electronics stores (complete with DVD rentals,) a Ben Franklin and local clothing store sharing one entrance, a quant little two-screen movie theatre and several restaurants that close their doors quite early on a weeknight. Vacancies are tough to find here, as the local populace, scant as it is, supports the shopkeeps in lieu of a massive discounter that won’t do much business in a region of the country so sparsely populated that it would be last in the Union upon admittance. Being so removed from the rest of the nation and its wonderful widgets probably gets old pretty quick, but for a minute or two you silently wonder what it would be like to live there. Everything is so patently classic American, a quaint throwback to the forties and fifties with more than enough modern amenities thrown in to placate the short attention spans of the modern citizen. Or is it just a facade covering the same issues every small town has, its problems masked by the false nostalgia experienced by tourists that don’t realize they’re the only source of income this remote land has?

The Yoopers seem to do good enough, ya?

Do Not Live In My County

Peter Stork — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:22:12 +0000

No matter what Progressive Farmer magazine says. Randolph ain’t that grand.

D3: The Mighty Ducks hd Okay, admittedly Chester is neat, with its rolling hills, picturesque views of the American Bottoms and its legendary Popeye Statue. The trip along Illinois 3 is nice, and it takes you to Red Bud, such a cute little town.

We also have some of Illinois’ most historic landmarks, with the first state capital at Kaskaskia The Sweep psp and the Fort de Charters French fort

in gorgeous little Prairie du Rocher.

download Year of the Horse Gee, maybe I’m now making a case for it myself.

Proof movie full

G.I. Jane on dvd

No, no, many counties have attractions like these, particularly to the southeast where the rural lifestyle lives in harmony with larger urban areas and the unique topography of the Shawnee National Forest. Half of Southern Illinois has more to offer, as well, leading me to wonder why Randolph would get singled out.

Maybe the check cleared.