OMG Donna, We're in Illinois!

We left Moscow, IA, this morning heading east on I80.  As it turned out, our concerns for the jack/leveling system on Nessie were very minor, and since the shop where we were parked doesn't allow overnight campers over the weekend, we took off.  127 miles later, we pulled into the Hickory Hollow RV Park in Utica, Illinois, just 100 miles west of Chicago.  This is a nice grassy, open park in the middle of some farms.  On one side we have a huge field of soybeans:

And in the other direction, a farmhouse off in the distance:

After we settled in, we decided to scout out the neighborhood.  This trip south brought us to Starved Rock State Park.  This is an area of bluffs (remember Decorah?) along the Illinois River.  Back in the early 1800's there was a fort on the top of Starved Rock, but it is long gone.  The only thing left is a model in the Visitors Center.

The road into the park was cool and inviting,

There were some structures on the river (locks?) that looked interesting, but we couldn't find out how to get near them,

It's easy to see how the river system was used to transport goods and people, and for that matter, it still does.  We continued on along the river to a town named Ottowa, where we got one last shot of the river,

Before getting back to the rv park,

The trailer across the road from us has been here so long that it's growing weeds on the top....