Small trips around Champaign
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Champaign is often thought of a cornfield city and nothing else. I have to admit that the statement is partially correct. However, there are several things to do if you are willing to drive a couple of hours. During Spring 2024, Poy and I made several small trips to our neighborhood cities, including Indianapolis and St. Louis. We also want to record here a small trip to see one of the most amazing natural pheonomena, the total solar eclipse.
St. Louis
Let start with our day trip to St. Louis. Yes, it was a day trip, so we went from Champaign early in the morning and came back late night. Before going to downtown St. Louis, we made a stop at “Cahokia mounds State Historic Site”, which is the site of a pre-Columbian Native American city. There are no ruins left anymore because people who lived here in the past made their houses of woods and other decomposable materials. We then stopped at a mexican flee market near by to get some tacos before heading to St. Louis zoo. Because the pictures here are not in order, let me skip the zoo and talk about our evening activities first. So after the zoo, we went to “the Gateway Arch”. Although it’s hard to believe, but this place is a national park… which sounds so wrong in many ways. Anyway, we went to the top of the Arch by a very sketchy elevator, which doesn’t go in the vertical direction but along the arch. The view was beautiful, but the jorney to it was scary (sorry to say that, but it’s true.)
Now, it’s time to talk about my favorite spot, St. Louis zoo! The zoo is free but with some small fee for parking. This is one of the most quality and worthwhile zoos in the US. The zoo is spacious and has various exotic animals. I do believe that they take good care of their animals as some of them were taken away to hospital while those who stayed seem happy showing off their faces. To summarize, a day trip in St. Louis was very fun. I would say that if you want to, you can also spend a night there to explore more of the city, but I’m not a city person, so a day is more than enough.
Indianapolis
Another city close to Champaign is Indianapolis. We went there in June to see Dalí Alive 360 which is an immersive exhibition at Newfiedls art museum. The below picture is Dalí!
Before we went to the museum, we visited the downtown for an hour. We had lunch at the old spaghetti house. The food was really great and it was a 3-meal couse for only 20ish dollars. We then walked to the “Soldiers & Sailors Monument” which is the center point of the town. We didn’t take the elevator to the top as there was a fee. We then kept walking to “Indiana War Memorial & Museum.” It was closed on that day due to the power outage, unfortunately. Since it was very hot that day, we decided to walk back to our car and drove to the central canal instead. The canal area was so much cooler, and a lot of people were sunbathing and kayaking.
After that we went to Newfields to see the exhibition. The fee was around $25 but it was so worth it. The entire 4th floor was devoted to the immersive exhibition, while the rest stories displayed their permanent exhibitions. We spent a good number of hours there and also walked to the Oldfields–Lilly House & Gardens next to the museum as well. We then ended our trip by going to Ikea to buy some kitchen stroller. The trip to Indiana was a good escape from Champaign. We will definitely keep an eye on the next exhibition at Newfields.
Total Solar Eclipse at Terre Haute
On Monday, Apr 8, 2024 around 2pm (EST), we were at the Sycamore Winery in Terre Haute, IN to see the total solar eclipse. Many classes got cancelled so that students could chase this once-in-a-life-time phenomenon. We camped in the winery half an hour before the shadow of the moon started to pass by the sun. We thought the moment when the sun was fully swallowed was already breathtaking, but the brief moment when the diamond ring happened was even out of this world. We tried to capture those moment through pictures, but none of those pictures can actually explain how thrilled we are.
Northern Light in Illinois
“On Friday May 10 around 9PM, the most significant G5 geomagnetic storm since 2003 hit Earth — causing several coronal mass ejections — and allowing many across the U.S. to see northern lights where they usually can’t.”
The news was shared through facebook around 11pm and we were at home, doing some work. Hearing that, we asked our friends who have a car if they are interested to see the northern light. They agreed and drove us through the cornfield around midnight. We drove for half an hour to escape from the city light and parked near a creek. The sky was so dark that we were already hopeless, but when we tried taking a picture of the creek, we saw the pink and green soft light above the sky - the northern light! Here’s the picture we took with our phone.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.