Parked at the Chicago Northwest KOA
We like old highways to stay away from the crowds, traffic and tolls on the interstate highways so we went west on US-24 and then took Illinois state highway 47 north all the way past Chicago. Unfortunately the workers were out in force and apparently, closing entire highways and routing detours of 10 to 15 miles, is SOP in Illinois. This happened twice but who’s counting?

Our plan was to get close to Milwaukee and then spend the night and get some rest before facing Milwaukee traffic on Monday morning. Getting all the way there today would have been good but it made the day too long and makes both of us too tired so unpleasant things can easily occur. There is a shortage of campgrounds around big cities and paying the price for KOAs is pretty hard to avoid. This time we could have gone farther but didn’t like the reviews that some of the parks got on TripAdvisor so we picked the KOA which can pretty much be relied upon.

Playing miniature golf at the KOA

The “husband of the owner” (that is what his name badge said) told us that people commonly spend the night here before going into Chicago by car (about 60 miles away) and they store your RV in “dry storage” for only $5 per day. Since our destination is just under 100 miles away and we would be storing the coach during our stay there anyway, we decided to change our routing plans and just use the tow car from here. The 200-mile round trip would cost us at least $125 in gas in the GMC. The storage fees and gas for the Tracker will cost us only $40 and it will be a lot more relaxing drive.