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!

The Shafferland Shuffle

Happy Sunday, my friends!! Hope you are having a great weekend! Here's what we've been up to this week:

* Last Sunday morning was our first time back in our church since before our vacation. It was good to be back! I made these chicken ranch tostadas for lunch and sent my sister a picture...she asked if those were marshmallows on top. LOL!!! I spent the day resting, scrapbooking, staring at my beautiful roses Ryan gave me, and napping. And I would just like to pause to say that our landscaping is still holding its own quite nicely at the end of the summer. Three cheers for everything staying alive!

* Monday I made blueberry scones with almond and coconut flour. WHOA. They were so good! Ryan said he could eat them every day of his life. Twist my arm! Hopefully our respective workouts took care of any scone damage. We had a really great evening together and then....tornado warnings. Sigh. I don't love storms.

* Tuesday afternoon, we went for a run and I had the privilege of stumbling in a puddle at the end of a guy's driveway. (I saw the puddle. I didn't realize the hole underneath it was as deep as it was. Whoopsie. I didn't fall, but it sure was an interesting stumble...super fun for the new guy across the street who just got home!) But in other exciting news that day, I spent time in the new IKEA catalog and a Beth Moore book, so that's a good use of time!

* Wednesday I was busy baking lunch and writing at the same time, so I had to bring the kitchen timer into the office so it could properly scare me to death at the end of the baking time. LOL! I enjoyed the cutest little lemon tart that day. One of our friend made it, and it was DELICIOUS! AND that night, Ryan had his first ever headshot! We are speaking at our church this fall, and we both had headshots taken before a meeting. Pretty fun!

* One of our friends gifted us some cat things she no longer uses now that she no longer has a cat. One of the items was this darling little bed. (SO SOFT!) We could not get Braeya to be interested in it, but she'd started sleeping on the desk while I worked, so I put the bed on the desk and she crawled right in. Slept for hours. Ryan had fun with some of his co-workers' kids that night, and then came the moment he's been waiting for all these months: the return of football!

* Friday was not our best day. We weren't the best versions of ourselves, which sometimes happens, but it's always unfortunate when it hits us both on the same day. Wasn't helped by finding an entire rose (outside!!) being devoured by beetles. Was not helped by grocery shopping. Oh my word. What an awful experience. But in the good moments of the day, I went through my first online Bible class for a little program I'm doing. Learned so very much in a short amount of time and got 100% on my test! :) And we had dinner with some new friends from church. They invited us into their home, shared dinner with us, and taught us some new games. It was so fun!

* And yesterday was a busy, busy day! We spent the entire day out at my parents' house helping them with some projects. Ryan installed some new light fixtures and did some painting high up on the house. And your Bekah girl? She learned to run a power washer. MAN that was fun. I am going to hurt like everything today, but I had a blast. (Ha! See what I did there? Blast?) Everything looked so great at the end of the day!

The Saturday Six

One.

I think you all know my favorite thing about football season is the chance to scrapbook for hours while Ryan watches TV. :) But even though football may not be my first love, and certainly even though I understand nothing about it, I think this video is pretty cool. Indiana Wesleyan (where I attended college and where I worked for the first eleven years of my adult life) launches its own football team this fall. Like for the first time ever in the history of the entire school. I haven't been to the campus to see the completed field, but the video shows the team reporting for training camp, moving in, and getting ready to start football...for the very first time in a school's history.

Two.

Speaking of videos, do you remember a few months ago when I featured some friends of mine who travel full time in an RV as they do evangelistic ministry around the country? They did a video tour of their RV. I love these kinds of videos.  I love home tours whether that home is on wheels or not. They're actually working on some renovations to the RV to switch up some of the sleeping arrangements as their kids get older. But this video shows the pre-renovation. I loved it!

Three.

This post makes me want to try my spiralizer on things other than just zucchini!

Four.

Are you a perfectionist? Yeah, I feel that!!! This is a great post about learning to strive for excellence over perfection. Maybe you need the words too!

Five.

One of my Instagram friends is in the process of trying to go as completely plastic free as possible. It's been intriguing to read her processes of learning to store things in new ways, and though I don't know that this will become our goal or journey, I did find this tutorial for making your own wraps and covers interesting. (These would replace plastic wrap and baggies, I believe.)

Six.

I'm still working on the book I started this week...it's not one you can rush through and get the most out of it that you can possibly get, so I slowed down to savor. Meanwhile, I have to share this. This is the most detailed travel plan of Route 66 I've ever seen. Ryan and I hit a couple spots on Route 66 during our vacation last month, and we also ate at one of the restaurants in Chicago on our anniversary trip a few years ago. But I do think it would be cool to drive the whole thing. And these people have DEFINITELY done their research. This is a post I love to read because it isn't fluffy.

Schlitterbahn Water Park!

Though Ryan was in no way opposed to a vacation built around meeting a baby, he did ask if we could spend a day at a water park. Well, sure! (If you are new here and don't know...I am not a water park girl. I don't like any rides of any kind.) He loves them so much and was excited to research a place to go. He landed on Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City.

So Wednesday morning of our vacation, we got up in Joplin, repacked the car, and drove two hours north to Kansas City (Kansas, this time, not Missouri) to spend the day at Schlitterbahn.

Ryan had done all his research and found out that this park had free parking (yay!) and you can take in your own food! So we took our cooler on wheels and stopped at the store before we went in to get some deli turkey and cheese to pair up with all the snacks I'd made at home and taken with us. We packed some water bottles, our sunscreen and beach towels, and got ready for a day at the park!

I will say, this was not an easy park to navigate in terms of getting in the entrance. It wasn't well marked from the part of the interstate we came from, but we found it eventually! (We could see the rides. We just couldn't figure out how to get to them!)

A few pre-park shots:

We got a locker to store our bag, so I didn't have to drag it around with me all day, and we got a map to figure out our plan. We will tell you that we didn't like the park as much as we liked Holiday World, which is in southern Indiana. Schlitterbahn didn't have as many thrill rides, and several of the ones they did have were closed the day we were there. (Short-staffed, I believe.) Most of what they had were slides, and sometimes one of the slides in a trio of them would be closed. So lines were long, but Ryan still had fun. Here are a few pictures of his fun:

(They also didn't have many convenient observation decks like Holiday World has, so I had a few obstacles in trying to figure out when he was actually going to appear in my picture zone!)

We took a break at lunch to sit under this really super nice huge shelter area and eat our snacks. (That shelter area saved my hide in the heat of the day.)

 After lunch, I changed into my swimsuit, too!

We decided to hang out by the pool and try the torrent river. I liked that way more than I thought I would. (I'm more of a lazy river girl.) But I liked it so much we did it twice! (We have no photos of the torrent river because we didn't have a waterproof camera or case for our phones.)

It was super sunny in the morning and clouded up as the day went along, but the heat climbed with or without the sun. By late afternoon, I needed shade and hydration. So Ryan went back to sliding and I went to hydrate. I found him in the lazy river a while later! (I would have done that one if I'd known!)

Ryan said he had a really fun day, even if there weren't as many rides as he expected. (Side note: this park had a fatality two summers ago, and the ride that kid was on is still standing, even though it's closed. I read they can't tear it down until the investigation is complete. It was a terrifying looking thing - although Ryan said he would have absolutely ridden it. Thankfully it wasn't an option!)

We did a few photo opps on our way out of the park....

One of the guys in our Sunday School class told us about a chicken place in Kansas City that he said we should try: Stroud's Chicken. So despite looking (and smelling) rather questionable, we made our way to Stroud's!

I wanted to get the food to go, because, well, see photo above. But we had a two hour drive to our Airbnb for that night, and there really wasn't a good way to eat the dinner we planned in the car. So we stayed to eat it. Thankfully they put us in a very back corner where humanity didn't really see or smell us.

We shared a dinner platter, which had SO. MUCH. FOOD. And it was definitely delicious.

I seriously could have had a perfectly happy day with the cinnamon roll alone.

On our way out of town, we stopped here for the FIRST TIME the whole trip. One week in, and this was our first visit. WHAT?!?!!?!?

And with that, we drove two hours to Columbia, Missouri, to our Airbnb. We were so tired when we arrived, but it had been a very good day!