In the Shawnee, a bunch of things that our kids thought were real cool and always remember - Will probably have to google them to find them, I don't remember exactly where, it was ~1988 or so:
- Fat Man's Squeeze.
- Garden of the Gods, the Shawnee version.
- Some natural stone arch in a forest that you can climb up via iron hoops to hold onto and step onto.
-Black Slough, in a forest outside of Vienna (pronounced VI-enna). The Black Slough pond is in a woods, trail from parking lot, find a long stick on the way in, the path goes onto docks over the slough. Water is covered in yellow-green tiny pebbles of algae, sweep it aside the water is black as night. Push stick into water, it meets a little resistance, and keeps going down, down, down. Forgot how many feet of vegetable matter is layered up down there.
Vienna is just off of I-24.
oh, here is the Black Slough
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron_Pond_%E2%80%93_Little_Black_Slough_Nature_Preserve
At the tip of IL, get off of I-57 at I think US 51, drive south, and then drive under and through the levee gate into Cairo IL. (pronounced Karo when well downstate). Drive all the way to the park at the tip, Fort Defiance. Walk down to the water's edge where the mighty Ohio flows into the not-so-mighty-yet Mississippi. The kids really enjoyed it, so did we, see the color difference between the two waters. Barges and towboats often come by, often in long multi-wide strings. Cairo is a very poor town, the park is OK. Long ago, it was thought that Cairo would become the biggest city in IL due to its location. Just up from the park are two road bridges, one to MO., the other to KY. The last time we were in Cairo was probably year 2000 or so.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff we did. All the Shawnee stuff we did in a early October. Have been to Cairo to go to the tip multiple times over the years, as we were passing by on I-57. One time when we stopped by, both rivers were in flood stage, the park was all under water. The bridge over the Ohio to KY was closed, so we walked out on the bridge to the center of the river. We assumed (heh heh) that the runaway barge that was cross-wise pinned up by the swift current against a bridge support wasn't going to take down the bridge.
