LW Travelogue

by Fred Fenton,

LW contributor

Why did we spend two weeks in southern Illinois during a heat wave? We traveled there at the end of June because two of Linda’s grandchildren and their father were moving from Chicago to the small town of Carbondale. The children’s mother, Linda’s daughter, had died in 2014. We had not seen the kids since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Flying from Long Beach to St. Louis, we drove a rental 140 miles to reach Carbondale, passing through fields of corn and soybeans, stretching as far as the eye could see. Our destination was a cabin in the woods, a chance to live close to nature.

I am a city boy. My idea of camping is from one Hilton to the next. A cabin sounded like something I could handle, until the GPS directed us onto a gravel road. The beautiful deep forest of trees, unlike anything in Southern California, took our breath away. However, the car was now kicking up a cloud of dust, even though we reduced speed to 20 mph. My discomfort became alarm when the road turned into one-lane, bumpy trail through the trees. What were we getting ourselves into? What sort of a cabin had we rented? It was with a sigh of relief we finally reached a lovely, 60-acre grassy spread in the forest, with what looked more like a house than a

The forest in southern Illinois.