Purple Aces Roadtrip 2006

We left the house around 9AM as planned.  I had checked the weather the day before to see what might be in store for the day.  Weather.com predicted partly cloudy with temperatures in the 40-50's.  They managed to get the temperature right, but the rest of it was wrong.  The sky was overcast and it did not appear to be going to open up at all.  Regardless we headed west towards Princeton.

Princeton is about 2 hours from Chicago by car.  To get there today we were going to take I-55 south to I-80 west.  We managed to get to Princeton around 11:30am.  So not bad.  We had been there one other time, but that was for a photo trip.  So a slightly different agenda for today.  When we arrived it had managed to stop sprinkling.  We walked up and down the Main street.  Lots of cute shops.

We looked in a couple of the antique shops.  And then on the way back to the car we came across a little health food store.  It was a cute little store that felt like it should be Flagstaff Arizona and not Princeton Illinois.  So we went in.    Shortly after we went in the lady running the store offered us a cup of tea.  Since I had been planning on getting a cup of coffee down the street I decided to try the tea.  The tea was really good.  It was a mint tea called Refresh.  We looked around at all the stuff and finally decided to buy some tea.  We bought some of the Refresh tea plus some herbal tea for Carla.

Next we drove down the street to the Antique mall.  We browsed through the mall.  It was fun as at a number of the stalls there were old Christmas things out.  I almost bought an string of C7 lights.  We also found a some Breyer horses like I bought for Margo.  So maybe in the future we will look for some of the horses for Margo at the antique stores.

At this point we were getting hungry for lunch.  The original plan was to eat in Galesburg, but this was still 60 miles away.  So we decided to try and find something in Kewanee.    When we got to Kewanee of course we couldn't find anything that fit our visual image of lunch and we punted and finally opted for Burger King.  Fortunatley at Burger King they have some halfway decent food. 

From Kewanee we headed towards Galesburg.  We had never been to Galesburg before and really didn't know much about it.  To our surprise the downtown area of Galesburg looked worthy of a complete afternoon.  Since it was now raining again we followed the signs to Carl Sandberg's birthplace.  Neither of us knew much about Carl Sandberg other than he was a poet.

When we got to the visitor center, we decided to go in since it was raining.  Inside they had a nice little exhibit that told the life story of Carl Sandberg.  Actually very informative.  We also got a tour of the cottage he was born in.  For me the exhibit wa s more interesting than the tour of the cottage.

We decided to make the mental note to look up some of Carl Sandberg books to see what was available used. 

Next on the plan was to checkout part of the Spoon River tour.  In the fall each year they have a big fall color driving tour.  We keep missing it, so we thought we would at least check it out for the future.  This part of Illinois starts getting hilly again, so can imagine that it could be really pretty in the Fall.

We made our way to Canton.  Again a nice looking little town worth spending some more time at.  Canton is about 30 miles south of Peoria. 

It was getting close to game time so we headed towards Peoria.