A while back, a friend asked me to load up my reading list:
-Life of Pi
-Dress your Family in Denim and Corduroy
-Where the Wild things are
-Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa puffs
-Travels with Charley
-On the road
-Stranger in the forest
-A Clockwork Orange
-Catch 22

I am certain the list is larger, but I am forgetting some of the books.

Unfortunately, there is not as much time to read as one might expect. Not as much as I expected at least. As a result I have only completed the top 4 and am working on the 5th. Most of the time I try to ride as many miles as I can in a day, which usually ends with me rolling into a park just before dark. When I do turn in early I usually try to update the blog or do some reading. Tonight I had the opportunity to do both because I stopped riding at 3pm.

When I arrived at the city park in Iroquois, IL I decided to stop and enjoy the beautiful weather by just relaxing. I read a lot and here I am updating the blog. The town has relatively large park where they installed some showers for bikers a bit back. Mayor Jack Karr gave me the official Iroquois welcome in sweat pants, slippers, button-up shirt, and Chicago Bears winter hat. He reminds me of a character out of Grumpy Old Men. The hospitality of Iroquois is a welcome change from that of the Hillcrest Resort, where I stayed a few nights ago.

Hillcrest was all kinds of confused. Its a resort/country club/camp site/permanent trailer park. The first thing you see is the golf course. Its well maintained and though I'm not Tiger, it looked like a pretty easy course. Next you see what looks like should be the Pro-shop, but that's everything: Club house, bar, restaurant, locker rooms, the camp ranger station, everything in one small building. The best is yet to come though, because when you go into the campground you see a village of trailers (not mobile homes but trailers/5th wheels) on cinder blocks as if you left it parked overnight in the wrong neighborhood. They are all packed together in no recognizable order and some even have porches built onto them. Almost everyone of them is covered in Chicago Cubs paraphernalia and has a custom golf cart (rims, candy paint, sub-woofers...Pimp my Ride: Cart Style) parked in front of it. In addition to being the coolest neighborhood I have seen, I had the coldest shower of my life here.

Reading suggestions are welcome.

Marcus