Day 3.2: Kent, OH to Buffalo Grove, IL

We decided to get up around 8am to try to fit a few activities in to the long drive, and left the house with Aaron in our car before 9am. It was easier than we thought to make room for a third passenger in the car, which was reassuring. We drove a few minutes into town to eat breakfast at Wild Goats, a local diner. After perusing their lengthy menu, Abe ordered the garden omelet with onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and spinach, choosing hash browns and an English muffin as his side. Arielle ordered an à la carte option: two egg whites with hash browns and an English muffin. Aaron got the avocado benedict. We enjoyed a nice meal and then stopped down the road for a short walk to a dam-turned-waterfall and a forested nature walk alongside it. We dropped Aaron back off at home, planning to return in exactly three weeks.

We drove about half an hour to Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which Aaron had highly recommended. There’s no entrance fee for this park, and we drove right to the Octagon Shelter parking lot. We knew there was a short path to a worthwhile viewpoint but weren’t sure whether to follow directions to the Ledges Shelter or to the Overlook, choosing the latter. We ended up walking up almost a mile through the trees past cool rock formations, which we think were the aforementioned Ledges themselves, arriving at a view of trees that wasn’t nearly as impressive as what we saw on the way up. There were numerous black squirrels and tiny chipmunks darting around, but they weren’t too fast for Arielle’s quick fingers as she managed to get a picture of a chipmunk!

We returned to the car and hit the road for our six-or-so hour drive to Chicago. Our first stop was at a fancy-looking travel plaza, which Abe thought resembled a school, to use the restrooms and get lunch. Abe ordered a beef burrito from Red Burrito, which was cheap and actually a lot of food, while Arielle ate a yogurt she had brought with her. Arielle had a call in the car while Abe caught up on TV watching and reviewing. We crossed into Indiana (and the central time zone) and stopped for gas at a travel plaza with 347 miles on the odometer and the empty light not yet on.

As we approached and then entered Illinois, we started hitting a lot of traffic.

Luckily, we had just enough extra time to spare, and made it to Buffalo Grove in time to make a quick supply stop before pulling in to the home of Lisa, Abe’s former colleague from USY. We enjoyed an incredibly delicious dinner prepared by Lisa’s husband, Michael, who also happens to be the uncle of our good friend, Laura, who Abe met in college. The highlights were grilled chip-thin-sliced salami with brown sugar as an appetizer, and the family steak and potatoes as a main course. We also had the opportunity to meet Sandy and see Eli, Lisa and Michael’s youngest son, who just graduated from college, and Rachel, another former colleague of Abe’s from USY.

With full stomachs, we stayed up for a while chatting and then went to bed.

Approximate number of miles covered: 435