Checking Out Allerton

Ryan and I have a tendency to pack our vacations very full. (You might have noticed that.) So as we wound our way home from Kansas, after spending many days with family, friends, sightseeing, and having fun at the water park, I thought it might be good to have a day of rest and simplicity for just the two of us. And via the magic of Pinterest, I learned about this place I'd never heard of, right in the middle of Illinois, called Allerton Park and Conference Center.

It's part of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (hope I have that listed correctly now!), but it's this huge park/natural area just outside the little town of Monticello, and on the Pinterest list I was reading, it was listed as one of the 7 wonders of Illinois. (I don't know if that's a permanent or revolving list, but either way, it intrigued me. The article I read said it had multiple hiking trails that added up to several miles, and there were pretty gardens, and best of all, you could stay there! They have hotel-esque rooms, so you can stay! It sounded like a great place to unwind to me!

So we left Columbia, Missouri on Thursday morning and drove toward Monticello. If you heard our vacation recap podcast, you remember the story of how we almost ran out of gas, and I almost had a for-real panic attack on an interstate? Yeah, that happened on this stretch. Oh it was so awful. I never want to recreate that experience on any other vacation ever.

We had plugged in the address for the Conference Center, and good old Chloe told us when to get off the interstate. She took us down a regular two lane road and then told us to turn, so we did, and you guys? This was our road. I am so not even kidding you.

This! This was the road! We thought for sure we'd messed something up, but the GPS was still rolling, so we kept following.

It got a little better:

We finally determined that this was the back entrance to the conference center. Very. Very. Back. We eventually wandered into the actual grounds, and even though some construction threw us off, we found our way to the check-in desk. We learned they were hosting a huge conference for college students that weekend, so they decided to put us in a house that was about a mile away from the main housing areas. (The property covered several miles.) It was a big old house with multiple rooms in it, and it was really spacious and comfortable:

They also had a coffee shop on the grounds, so we stopped for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up.

After we carried in our things, we wanted to get busy hiking the trails, and if you heard the podcast, you'll know things didn't quite go as planned. We loaded up on our bug spray and headed into the woods, but the mosquitoes there are unlike any I had encountered in years. We were literally just short of running, trying to keep from being bitten. If we paused at all, for pictures or anything, they found us. In fact, my bites were so awful, they not only itched, but they flat out hurt.

So the trails were nice, wide, easy hiking, but we had to abandon them pretty quickly because it was absolutely miserable. Here are a few shots from the time we did spend there.

Mr. Allerton, who once owned all this land as his property, was quite a lover of art, so there were TONS of sculptures all over the place. After we abandoned the trails, we moved into the actual gardens, and they were very beautiful. (And art filled. We sure saw a lot of art on this trip!)

They also had a garden with a gazebo like structure you could climb. We had to wait for a bridal AND dance photo shoot to be done before we got a turn, but it was pretty!

When we checked in, the lady at the desk asked if we were familiar with the area, and we said no. She recommended a restaurant for dinner...and we tried it! It's actually an old church remade into a restaurant. The food was even better than we expected! 

After dinner, we went back to the room and just rested and watched movies. It was a lovely, low-key night. Even though the time at Allerton wasn't quite what we expected (I'm lookin' at you, bugs), it was still a great stop, and we would absolutely recommend this place! Unique and restful!