As the weather in northern Illinois hit 70 degrees Monday afternoon, of course the first thought that came to mind was, “Where do I want to travel to?”

After all, nicer weather means a more enjoyable travel experience. Plus, with this website being a thing for me now, the more trips the better.

However, as the nicest day of 2025 thus far came to be, I found myself stuck at home and not leaving town. Boo hoo! That’s because I had work on one of my magazines that I needed to wrap up Monday morning, and I couldn’t get it entirely finished until 1 p.m. Surely there’s enough daylight to do something, I thought; this coming the weekend after picking up an extra hour of daylight with springing ahead in time.

The truth is, I just can’t engage on a day trip unless the entire day is blocked off for that purpose. Typically with destinations that I go on, they are a mix of indoor and outdoor destinations. Much of the indoor destinations close by 4 or 5 p.m., and not many are open on a Monday. Now I could make multiple trips to the same area, one for the outdoor stuff and another for the indoor stuff, but at this moment I’m choosing to preserve the fuel in my tank (and therefore money).

I struck out on this day’s opportunity, but there are many more days left to make things happen.

Staying at home, I started to think about all of the places that I hope to visit in 2025. This is usually the time of year for it. I log my road trip ideas in a journal (I bought one of those blank ones years ago from a Borders liquidation sale) with the hopes to expand upon those plans the more I think about them. Then when I go on the trips, I’ll write down notes from each one about new places to explore a second time around.

Initially, I was back-and-forth on whether or not I should make my road trip ideas public, but, you know what, maybe it won’t hurt. Here’s 10 of them:

• Mines of Spain, Dubuque
• Old Courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, Beardstown
• Botttomley-Ruffing-Schalk Baseball Museum, Nokomis
• Wally’s, Pontiac (and other things in town)
• Jack Benny sites, Waukegan
• Buffalo Bill Cody Homestead, McCausland
• Lotton Art Glass Museum, Crete
• Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago
• Kelch Aviation Museum, Brodhead
• Park Forest 1950s House Museum, Park Forest

Who knows if these will actually happen, but there’s more that I’ve written into my journal. I also have a family-based road trip that I’ve been planning for a few months that hopefully I will be able to take some of my family on.

What’s on your list?

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Some website updates

When I relaunched this website, I hoped to make it a goal to have at least one thing a week on it. Work kind of got in the way. It would be nice if I actually made it somewhere each week, but that just isn’t in the cards at the moment.

I dug up around 40 different road trip features that I have written for the magazines, many of them from Lake Lifestyle. I plan to share those throughout the year. I know that it will feel like I’m recycling reruns, but many of you reading this likely haven’t seen them before. Those posts will consist of the making of the trip and notes about it, and then providing a link to the story on its online magazine format.

I also plan to write separate entries about past trips to help fill the gaps as well.

I’m hoping this mix of past trips, past articles and new trips makes this website worth it.