Our ride up was cool.....it started out great.....the weather was beautiful. The further north we got things started to change. We had to stop every so often and put more and more clothes on! Don't forget it was only April....beautiful down south, but cold up north!! When we noticed it getting colder than Memphis we thought it would be a good time, while we were still relatively warm, to find a camping spot. VIOLA! Right across the Illinois state line about 150 miles was a gorgeous place called Rend Lake.
Rend Lake is a 190,000 acre lake set up with EVERYTHING you could want for whatever type of camping you could want. They have all these areas seperate.....so the RV's are in one area of the park and the primitive camp spots in another. Since it was early in the camping year we had the whole area around us to ourselves!! Cool!! It was so great that we made a point and rode our asses off after we left Milwaukee to make it down there again!! We stayed longer and it was warmer too!!
Ranger 'Bob' (we named him that) was great and all the rangers did a drive thru of our area several times during the night to make sure we were safe. This made us feel better about being the only ones out there. Our first time there it got pretty cool at night. We built an awesome fire and cooked out and just rested up for the ride the next day. It was SO relaxing.....we were right on a part of the lake that was protected from too strong a wind coming thru......It was an incredible view!
Our second time thru we stayed a couple days and checked out one of the local bars, as we had seen quite a few scooters there when were there before. It was a biker friendly bar...the owners are riders.... had a blast and DEFINATELY plan on returning again. Check 'em out if your in the area and let 'em know you found 'em here!!! It's called the Iron Horse Saloon, it's on your right when your coming into town from Rend Lake....you can't miss it!!
