We're in Glen Elyn, a suburb of Chicago, visiting Rick's son Matt and his wife Trish. Mark and Cristin drove up from Columbus to join us. One of the reasons that we're here is to see Matt and Trish's new house. They spent years finding just the right property and built an amazing house. Every detail has been considered and the place looks beautiful.
I mentioned in a previous entry that it's often tough to find decent campgrounds, sometimes any campground, when you get close to major cities. Chicago is no exception. We're staying at a really strange campground called Blackwell Family Campground. It's in a county park that's fairly close to Matt and Trish. It's only open on the weekends and we arrived on Thursday, so we had to improvise. Matt visited his local police station and got permission for us to spend 24 hours on the street across from his house. It worked fine, but it was quite cold. We had to put the furnace on. What happened to the heat wave we experienced last weekend in Columbus? The high on Thursday wasn't more than about 55.
On Friday we were able to check in to the campground. The place has a million rules, including a curfew! We had to be back at the campground by an hour after sunset! No night life for us in Chicago! They would come around the campground each night with a bull horn and tell everyone that the gates were closing and no one would be let in or let out!
The campground has only an electric hookup (no water or sewer). We knew this ahead of time. No problem...many public parks have limited hookups. But in all our travels, we have never seen a park which welcomed RV's that didn't provide some place within the park for the RV's to fill their fresh water tanks. The college kids dressed up in ranger suits that run this place said "you should have called ahead if you had any questions" when I asked what I was supposed to do for water! Poor Rick was obliged to schlep gallon water jugs, two at a time, back and forth to the unthreaded water pumps and pour them into our fresh water tank by hand. He was losing a good half of each jug because of the angle that he had to pour and wishing he had a funnel. Suddenly I remembered that I did indeed have a funnel! When we had checked in to the Coach House Owner's Club rally in PA several weeks ago, they had, mysteriously, given us a set of plastic funnels at check-in instead of the usual tee shirt. At the time, I scratched my head and thought "what a strange giveaway." I resolved to take them home and put them in the kitchen or garage. Little did I know that we would be in such need for them so soon. Thank you CHOC for saving the day!
On Friday night Matt and Trish made us an amazing feast. Matt used his smoker to smoke a pork butt and a brisket which had been treated with his own recipe of homemade pork rub and we drank delicious beer that he has been brewing in his basement.
On Saturday the guys played golf in the morning. Later, the six of us went to a beer brewers festival.
When you're away from home for a long time the services that you depend on at home need to be attended to on the road. It was time for a haircut and color. On Saturday I found a nice salon in Chicago and got it taken care of while the boys were golfing.
We leave tomorrow for Indiana Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan.
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