But that's a later story...
Our night at the Mill Creek campground was nice and quiet, just the sound of Cicadas. It was, as usual for the Corp of Engineers, a well kept campground. The facilities were a bit old, but it had clean hot showers. The refrigerator cooled down pretty well overnight, powered by AC rather than propane, with the freezer back in single digits. We didn't expect this to last as a hot day was forecast.
After fresh coffee and Ellen's delicious banana bread, we headed down the quieter road. Since we were already a ways from the interstate, we decided to go west on US 224, just outside the campground, all the way to US 30 (the historic Lincoln Highway) and take that most of the way to Chicago, until it intersected with I-80. Seeing the rural mid-west at 50 mph, rather than 60.
Aside from a couple of road closure detours, it was a pleasant ride through the country. We hit the first US 224 closure about 20 miles into trip and it took us about 15 extra miles. Looking at the map we realized that the detour was designed for trucks and we could have avoided most of it by taking farm roads paralleling US 224. This realization served us well at the next closure, where we did just that and saved another 15 miles.
US 224 was a combination of two-lane and four-lane highway that took us across all the way across Ohio, through tiny towns and small towns, not an espresso bar in sight—lots of corn and beans—and a massive wind farm. We went right through the middle of this. There must have been at least a hundred wind turbines covering the farm landscape like some giant crop. It seemed an ideal placement for wind generator as they took a minimal footprint in corn and bean fields, just a pad around the base and a narrow gravel access lane. While it was pretty calm at ground level, there seemed to be plenty of wind higher up as they were all spinning along.
After a brief detour on smaller roads beyond Ottawa, OH, which went straight westward, we connected with the Lincoln Highway, which was a four-lane highway, but also went through towns. They got larger as we got closer to Chicago and had become a strip of mall-after-mall and traffic light-after-traffic light by the time we reached Valparaiso, IN. After a few more miles of that, we took a northern road up to I-80 and the interstates that ran below Chicago and around to I-39 ending up at Rock Cut State Park, just of the highway ten miles from the Wisconsin border.
Rock Cut State Park bills itself as the largest state park in Illinois. While on the road, we checked it out online and found that there were several hundred campsites in the park and they were far from booked this night. What we didn't take into consideration was that it was a Friday night in midsummer. We arrived about 8:30 PM and there were sites available, but the campground was almost completely full, so it was chock-a-block with campers—lots of big family groups and closely packed campsites—and it was hot.
We had decided to seek out a campground rather than a usual free overnight stop because we wanted AC to power the air conditioning. Speedy seems to absorb a lot of heat when traveling on hot days, from both the air and highway. As soon as we stop and turn of the engine-powered air conditioning, the van heats up quickly, even after dark. As the temperature was in the 90's, we decided to wimp-out a bit and stop where we could plug in and power the camper air conditioner. Speedy had absorbed so much heat that the fresh water from our tank was so warm than we didn't have to heat water to wash the dishes.
We left the air conditioner on until the middle of the night when it had cooled down enough to sleep with some fresh air.
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