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Chronicles of Summer Part 2

Workout:  2 miles easy, Upper Body Endurance

Summer.  In Illinois.  I kinda think it's the best place to spend the month of July!  Hot days, cool nights, fire flies, soft grass, corn fields - oh my gosh, and Monical's Pizza!  With french dressing!  Okay, anyway...

Adventure 4

Fourth of July with the family!  Loads of fun!  My sister lives right across the street from the park that has a huge firework display.  The park is so packed it's insane.  However, we have our own private viewing area in her backyard.  It's perfect, really!  We had some seriously amazing food, homemade lemonade shake ups,  tons of sparklers for the kids, glow sticks, and flash copters.  We were set!  

All the cousins together for the 4th!


We also had this super cool cotton candy maker.  You drop in 2 jolly ranchers, and within seconds it melts it down and makes cotton candy!  Any hard candy will work, but our choice for the night was Jolly Rancher.  The kids were obsessed!!

Adventure 5

Day trips.  We took quite a few of these it seems.  Chicago, Peoria, Springfield.  We made the rounds.    It's what you do when you move away.  You try to visit every place you love, and eat at all the best local restaurants.  It's a great way to gain weight.  Monical's, Avanti's, Portillo's.  Good grief!!  So much food!  We took our annual shopping trip to Chicago.  However, after this trip I realized I like the shopping in Fort Myers and Naples better.  And a first for us was taking the kids to Lincoln's New Salem.  This is a reconstruction of the village where Abe Lincoln spent his early adulthood.  It's a really cool family friendly place.

Girl's trip to Chicago.  Going to do some shopping along Michigan Ave.

Orlando, and his best bud, Maya.  They were a little more into playing tag than looking at the historic village.  

Adventure 6

I love, love, love biking out in the country by my parent's house!  It's quiet and scenic, and actually quite hilly so it's a pretty tough work out.  Allerton Park is a must for an adventure!!  It's better to run out there because you can see more of the sites on foot, but laziness got the best of me this time around and that never happened.  Anyway, this particular biking adventure landed me out at The Sun Singer.  This park, and particularly this statue are kind of a big deal in good old Monticello, IL.  And by big deal I just mean that it is pretty well known, and sorta puts our town on the map;)
Don't you wish you looked as cute as I do in a bike helmet??

The Sun Singer.  I couldn't stop for long because the mosquitos were  unbearable!!

The adventures really do keep on going!!  This is really just a snippet of what I had on my phone.  Almost 5 weeks in Illinois went way too fast.  We had a blast making memories, and already can't wait for next summer!!


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