I had the rare chance to get outside for a while during the day today and enjoy the ridiculously great weather we’ve been having here in Illinois. I’m booked all day every day teaching, both at my student teaching placement and with my 25 private bass students. Add in gigs on the weekends and on some weeknights and I’m booked from dawn to dusk 7 days a week. Not cool.
Needing to be up in Libertyville, IL for private teaching this afternoon, I decided to drive a couple of miles north and check out Independence Grove, a forest preserve and recreation area that I’d been meaning to check out for years.
While Illinois pales in comparison to New Mexico or South Dakota (my wife’s home state and my home state, respectively), this wonderful nature area captures the charms of the prairie and the waterway-rich landscape of Lake County and is a great place to relax.
When I was younger, I would try to get away from it all and go for a walk outside just about every day. My time for this is almost nil right now, so I try to seize any opportunity to get outside and enjoy the fall.
Independence Grove has a great trail system, a lake with a beach, and a lot of restored prairie. While it might not compare to hiking the Sandias in Albuquerque like I was doing two months ago, it is definitely a great place to take in the natural beauty of Illinois!
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Hey Jason,
I will definitely agree that the Chicago area is not the most beautiful part of the country. But, I will say if you haven’t made it south to Shawnee National Forest you are missing one of the more beautiful parts of the country right here in Illinois. It’s definitely worth the drive. Just my 2¢. You are definitely right about Independence Grove its simply charming.
Jason-
Some beautiful spots in that neck of the woods, but my home state of Tennessee has some stunners, too. Having gone to the Smokies almost yearly growing up, I was booked with a band here in Nashville to play in Gatlinburg for a convention and decided to go up early, set up and take a familiar trail up to a falls, come back and play. I shared my little excursion with the rest of the band and was horrified to learn that most of them had never even been to the east side of the state to check out this wonderful national park. I’m pretty sure they had visions of me out in the wilderness, blazing trails with a machete! Gotta take a break once in a while for some peace and quiet in the woods.
Ike