Abandoned Barn in Brussels, IL
Holga
One of the best things about 2009 for me has got to be my discovery of the area around me. Seems weird to say this after living here nearly all of my life. As a child I rarely left the neighborhood around my home, as a teen it was primarily the communities around me, in college it was the entire city, and post-college it was pretty much all over the US and some trips to Europe. I seemed to skip that area just outside my wider home radius.
On a drive back from Kentucky this summer my wife and I took the extremely long way home, coming home mostly up route 3 in southern Illinois. During the drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about why we both had never made it down there before. It just felt like we had discovered some lost region that was accessible only on a 2-3 hour drive, some under appreciated region that people forget when they trash the area for being flat. That’s where I’ve been going nearly every weekend that I can during the last 2 months. Not only the regions, parks and trails of Southern Illinois near Carbondale… but the area just north of St. Louis/St. Charles, like Calhoun County.