This Year's Vacation

Last year for our vacation we traveled to Illini State Park near Marseilles, IL where we camped for a week and traversed part of the I&M Canal trail on our bicycles. We had thunderstorms four of the seven nights that we camped out, the tornado siren went off once, and I sustained a hugely painful knee injury falling off my bike on one of the trails. Other than that we had a fabulous vacation.

This year for various reasons we chose to return to the same location. The weather was fabulous (except for one day when we and the bikes got rather wet on the trail), there were no bike mishaps on the trail, and we had a really wonderful time. Since we didn't want to cover the same ground that we had last year, we drove the van to the last year's respective endpoints and rode our bikes further from there. By the end of the week we had covered a total of 71 miles on our bikes, and between the two trips we have now covered the majority of the trail. We reached the westernmost point of the trail at LaSalle/Peru on one trip and got as far as Aux Sable access on our other long riding day. We found that the trail conditions varied from mostly well-maintained toward the eastern end to very rustic and challenging on the western end. However we really enjoyed the trip and are planning another biking vacation for next year.

Afghan Design Contest Results

Well, I heard from Mary Maxim today. I didn't win the first prize (although the lady who called said it was very close) but they wanted to buy the heart afghan pattern from me anyway! So when the December issue of the Mary Maxim catalog is released I'll be a published designer. I'm pretty excited and will definitely post a link to the pattern once it's published.