geekgrrl's grand day out

yesterday i met up with a charming gentleman with whom i'd been corresponding by email and phone for a few months now. we were to have lunch at the Signature Room at the Hancock building (!), and then... well, didn't know and neither did he. it involved going on a tip from a friend of his. so he put the location in his car's navigation system and let it lead the way.

we started going west on North Avenue, which turned into I-64. we went past Northlake and Carol Stream; drove thru quaint St. Charles; then past Wasco and Sycamore, which i've never heard of; past Byron (tried to see the cooling towers of their power plant but couldn't.. a really bad fog had kicked up out in the boondocks), past Rockford.. finally we ended up in Mount Carroll, Illinois, a 150-mile, three-hour jaunt out of town. yup, 150 miles. on a first date. with a guy i've never met before. who says i ain't adventurous?

we were early for whatever the heck we were doing, so we chilled at a local DQ, where you can get a shamrock shake all year round, god bless 'em. they call it creme de menthe, but you can't fool me. then we headed to.....the Raven's Grin Inn. a haunted house out in the middle of absolute nowhere, at the end of a dead-end street. how romantic! in all honesty, it was pretty cool. the guy running the place was nuts. he tended to be schticky, but when he dropped the routine and talked to us person to person - we were the only two on the tour - he had some interesting stuff to say. the whole place reminded me of the Winchester Mystery House, or at least i feel it would if i'd ever been there. floors/walls at crazy angles, two slides (i only went down one, at my date's insistence, screaming the entire way down - fun!), immensely skinny and/or tall stairs, passageways leading inside and outside in freezing weather.. it was a trip. i'd never really been to a haunted house before. he built up the house with the slides and the weird passageways and everything, but it truly is supposed to be haunted. didn't see/feel anything, though. :(

on the way back we got stopped for speeding in Carol Stream. that was fun and bullshit at the same time. i noticed us slowing as we came out of a stoplight, then saw headlights in the rearview.. and then the flashing lights started up. the p'liceman claimed we were doing '66 and climbing' in a 45, which oddly enough was just enough to put us in the '21 and over' $95 ticketing zone. what's even odder is that when i looked at the speedometer as we were slowing, it only said 52 mph. truly a mystery.

oh, i ended up with some pictures from my little adventure. between St. Charles and Wasco, my companion noticed something at the side of the road. whipping back around to investigate, it turned out to be a very old mausoleum belonging to the family farm across the way. having just dined at the Hancock, we were dressed in our brunchy best (although in retrospect i don't know why.. wrinkled jeans and t-shirts were the attire of choice for the proles we saw), yet we climbed up the back hill overlooking the crypt to get a better look. a nice spooky find to go with a nice spooky day.