Okay, so it wasn’t the Illinois Central.
And it wasn’t Monday morning; it was Monday evening.
But it was still awesome. With Emily having to work in Chicagoland this week, it was the perfect opportunity to travel the rails alongside Route 66. After arriving at a friend’s house in Plainfield to catch up on sleep after the Motor Tour, we spent Monday – our first anniversary – heading up the Mother Road out of Joliet all the way up to Michigan Avenue. We missed a few miles of road in Joliet, but we’d taken Veterans’ Parkway around Springfield on Saturday so we’d already cheated once. It’s the thought that counts.
At 6:05 that evening she dropped me off at the historic Joliet Union Station and I jumped the 305 Amtrak southbound to Carlinville. We paused only once – just south of Odell to wait for a freight to pass – and the trip along the Mother Road, coming just one day after we had traveled north, was a fun way to head back home. Of the landmarks easily visible from the train I only missed the Polk-a-Dot and pretty much all of Chenoa before darkness stole my vision from me near Sherman. For a moment I thought I’d missed the Cayuga Meramec Caverns Barn, but then it snuck up on me; with the elevation of the tracks at that point the view of the barn from the train is incredible.
An added bonus: the train car was lined with AC power plugs enabling me to plug in my laptop and do work, specifically for the festival this weekend. The result was me doing about five minutes of work while heading out of Joliet before I ditched the notebook and dug out the iPod. I was just too distracted away from my sightseeing.
• The aforementioned festival is Farmersville’s Irish Days, the village’s annual town fiesta that was once featured on the Illinois Motor Tour. This Friday night and Saturday we’ll have a booth at the event promoting the Association, handing out applications and hopefully educating some people about Route 66. Maybe we can even sell a few cookbooks. I’m assembling a binder full of 8.5×11 prints of Illinois Route 66 landmarks and information about them (and I’ll have some of those prints for sale as well) and there will be a large poster celebrating the preservation efforts of the Association over the years.
We’re looking forward to Litchfield next week, as well, though we’ll just be hanging out at the Illinois Association/Pontiac booth a little bit. I’d love to attend the breakfast at the Ariston on Sunday morning, as well, but we have to go to church sometime. And the rest of the weekend is packed.