Aw sheep dip! Galena done gone gangsta! Me & My Boys – the nephews Vance & Quinn – hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and since they were moving to North Carolina the week following, I decided I had to get back to Illinois to see them and make sure they are sent off properly by their Unk with the Funk. I can say for certain we did what we had to so as to do things right!
The thought of the boys moving the North Carolina, and thus making it even harder to see them, I made plans to visit before they went. The super awesome good news (and I can only include this part in my travelogue because I am so late in finally writing it) is that after the visit, and after I got home, I found out their plans had changed and that they weren’t going to North Carolina at all. That is incredibly good news for so many reasons - many of which I don’t think I could explain here – but at the time we were visiting, I was thinking this would be my last chance to see them for a long time, so you’ll forgive me if the trip seems a little overboard.
We decided our ultimate destination would be Eagle Point Park in Dubuque Iowa, about 2 hours from the Rockford area, which is where my peeps live. The drive up to Dubuque from north-eastern Illinois is a trip I know very very well. My mother’s father was born and raised in Dubuque, and might have lived his whole life there had he not been shot up in World War II and sent to the VA in Illinois where he bumped into my Grandmother (I think he asked her for a light in the hall at the hospital where Grandma did volunteer work.) Grandpa’s siblings and that whole side of the family pretty much stayed in and around Dubuque, so it was at least once a year we would pack up a car or two and head out as an extended family to go and meet the Iowa family for a day out at the awesome Eagle Point Park. Sometimes we might go to Aunt Helen or Aunt Marie’s house, and often we would end up at the Dubuque dog track before the day was over, but Eagle Point Park is, was, and always will be a location that is very important to our family history. In fact, Grandpa’s ashes were spread out over one of the bluffs there (overlooking the lock and dam), so I think of part of my Grandpa’s spirit as being there. I feel it along the whole ride, especially when I get first look at the big valley cut by the river.
I think both of the boys had been to Eagle Point Park, and Vance is old enough to remember Grandpa (the boys’ Great-Grandfather), but even though Grandpa got to see Quinn as a little baby, Q has no recollection of him. That is all the more reason that he be taken out on the great trek to the northwest…all the more reason to make sure he learns the historical markers along the route we have been following for decades.
I don’t expect a young boy in early grade school to get excited over the prospect of going to a park 2 hours drive away, but we always have fun when the 3 of us head out. There are plenty of road games we play (they are smart as can be and tough to beat in many of them), and even though there is a 30-year spread in our years, we never run out of things to talk & joke about. Vance, after our trip to Australia and Hong Kong, has proven himself a most worthy travel partner; I know we do well. Quinn is also shaping up to be a nice travel partner in his own way. He certainly isn’t a wilting flower when it comes to expressing himself and what he wants. If anything, the boy can be a chatterbox with no more intriguing topic than himself. Don’t read that the wrong way – it really is half his charm.
So heading out from Rockford, we got on US20 heading west with our first stop planned for Galena and the Chestnut Ski Lodge. Yes. Midwestern Ski Action. Of course, we weren’t going for skiing in August, we were headed to Chestnut to ride their awesome little mini-toboggan cars down the chutes built into the side of the hill. For those used to Colorado or Tahoe for skiing, and even those used to New Hampshire and the Adirondacks, skiing in Illinois and Iowa would probably be seen more as a cruel hoax than anything. The hills there could not be called mountains by any reasonable definition – they are not. That said, the valley carved out by the upper Mississippi River in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota could rightfully be referred to as “God’s Country”. No matter where I have gone or what I have seen, I am still always enthralled by the beauty of the upper Mississippi River valley. The bluffs – particularly around Dubuque, Prairie Du Chien Wisconsin, and Marquette Iowa – are incredibly beautiful. The only national park in the state of Iowa is the Effigy Mounds, which are huge mounds built by Native Americans in the shape of animals. The shapes are of bears and such, and in theory, were built as burial mounds whose shapes were discernable only by God/The Great Spirit who looked down from above at them. The hike up to the mounds, and around the mound sites themselves, really is quite impressive. Eagle Point Park is built high on one of these bluffs too. In short, the whole area is spectacular.
Galena Illinois is blessed not only by having much history attached to it (U.S. Grant was living there when he received his orders from Lincoln to take command of the armies in the east.) The town itself is quite beautiful, loaded with bed & breakfasts, antique shops, and even a Happy Joes (and their delightful Taco Pizza.) I would recommend Galena to y’all, but they also are afflicted by a case of the cutesies, as you can see by the fact they actually have a store called Poopsies (you have to admit – we are bombing the wrong people.)
The ride up to Chestnut itself is beautiful. Northwest Illinois is one of the best kept secrets in the country. It is anything but flat, for one. I have never been to Switzerland, but little towns like Elizabeth sit in the middle of land that makes me think of a little Swiss dairy town or something.
Being the train nerd that I am, I do always make a stop in the town of Elizabeth to visit the museum of the Chicago Great Western Railroad. This railroad is all but gone now, having been absorbed by the Chicago & North Western in the early seventies, and upon absorption, having the CNW rip up nearly every single bit of track the CGW ever laid. I don’t know why I love the CGW so much. I do think their paint scheme was righteous. They also used beautiful, round-nosed E & F unit engines on their trains. They ran through the town of Hillside at one time, which is where I grew up. By the time I lived there though, the tracks were gone. All I remember of the remnants of the tracks is that there was a stretch intact to serve the Ovaltine factory in Villa Park. I also remember (and if I had to guess how I got attached, this is it) that there is a very high bridge of theirs that was still in service over the Fox River. We used to go to Pottawattamie Park under the bridge, and for some reason, the site of that bridge always frightened me. It looked old and was rarely used. I thought for sure it would topple (remember, I was a kid and always had a weird relationship with abandoned railroad bridges – it is odd, and I have discussed it here before, so I won’t get into it now, but I know there is some Freudian weirdness about the whole thing…I still get bugged by abandoned railroad bridges to this day and am well aware the whole thing is f’d up.) Anyway, I always stop at the CGW railroad museum. I was hoping it was open so I might get a new shirt or hat. Sadly, they were closed, but I still got to grab some shots of the station and caboose that are still there.
Eventually, we made it to Chestnut. Quinn had never been down the chutes, nor had he ever taken a ski-lift before. I am not the sort who is gonna stand there yelling at a frightened child to “sack up and stop crying like a little girl and GIT ON THAT THERE SLIDER AND GIT DOWN THAT HILL BOY!!!!” If he was bothered by the heights or scared of the ski lift, I would totally have understood. They also had mini golf, so it wasn’t like the visit would have been a total bust. As I thought he would, Quinn was cool about trying it and as long as I rode with him on the first trip down and up, he agreed to give it a rip. Naturally, it is fun as heck, and once he raced me down (he won – and I took video on the ride down to prove it; I will try posting the video later) he was good to go again without me.
Yeah, I am a wuss, but I got them tickets for 5 rides and got myself only 2. I am a little old and the cart wasn’t really designed for someone of my ample stature. He & Vance were fine to ride down together. It was enough for me to stand at the top and take in the view – a view of the river I totally dig. We did have a little bit of a late start, so after 3 or 4 rides, we decided to call it and head out for Dubuque.
Since this trip was – in every sense – a family day, I decided it was time to take the boys on their first trip to one of the must-see stops along the way. For as long as I can remember, when the whole fam was heading out on a trip for Eagle Point Park, we HAD to make a stop in East Dubuque at one of the finest beverage stores on the planet...I HAD to take the boys to Family Liquors.
“1 adolescent and 1 child being taken into a liquor store like they were being taken to a science museum or art exhibit? Have you no shame??!?” Fair questions I suppose, but Family Liquor is not just a liquor store…no no no. They do have the biggest selection of adult beverages I have ever seen, but they also carry many weird regional sodas (a long time hobby of mine), and I wanted to make sure the boys had their chance to sample sodas from off the beaten track – in short, my hope was that the boys might begin to develop a more sophisticated soda-consumption regime; but also to be honest, I wanted to go in and see if they had Leinie’s Berry Weiss (the only beer drink I love is half Leinie’s Berry and half Guiness), and also see if I could find any of the horrid regional beers that one can only describe to non-Midwesterners by serving them…Grain Belt, Wisconsin Club, Rhinelander, Blatz, Hamms, Huber, or any of the other myriad concoctions that get one drunk AND remove barnacles from the hulls of supertankers. Unfortunately, none of the truly nasty offenders was available, so I settled for a super-regional beer that is surely no fun to drink but whose cans have always been lovely: Point Beer, from Steven’s Point Wisconsin (if you can track down one of their 1976 Bicentennial cans I will pay you at least fair market value for it.) If any of y’all visit me in Oaktown, let me know if you would like me to chill for you one of the 3 cans of Point I got home; it would be my pleasure! After our shopping adventure in East Dubuque, it was time for a visit to Dubuque proper…it was time for A RETURN TO THE (b)LAND BETWEEN TWO RIVERS. For us to storm a Red State as we were planning was an audacious undertaking to be sure, but after braving the killer chutes of Galena, we were ready for anything and expecting to find nothing.
As always, the truth was somewhere in-between…visit tomorrow for pt. II of the boys day out.