We hung out for a long weekend in towns around Starved Rock State Park like Ottawa, Oglesby, La Salle, and Peru areas.

We hit a restaurant in one of those towns on a Friday or Saturday night, with 70s & 80s venier paneling, a smoking section (area :-), cough), bee hive starchy blond/brunette hair-dos, typical cocktail bar, all the stuff one might see in a retro super club from back in the day when folks from local farms might come into town to eat on Saturday night, real retro stuff, including the muzak.:-) Hell, I’m surprised Nixon didn’t show up to press the flesh. (that last one was a joke)

The usual gaggle of gift shoppes and/or antique outfits were peppered about the communities and parts of the old shipping canal that headed over toward Chicago was also added to the tourist mix as bike trails and stuff.

Nice rural country, probably slightly west of your story place. Many times heading south to the gulf states we would simply bypass this area and continue on through the endless corn and soy fields of Illinois, America’s drive over flatland. :-)

We used to make jokes about Illinois drivers coming up to Wis, but nowadays I’ll bet Illinois people are laughing it up about our totally backward statehouse of idiots running our state, I mean idiocracy.