Bag of Apples

Busy day. Not such a busy weekend, though. We’d imagined an overnight trip down to central Illinois, to take advantage of Lilly being off from school on Friday (“Institute Day,” it says on the school calendar). But that notion got pared down to a day trip to the Royal Oak apple orchard near the Illinois-Wisconsin line. See last year’s posting.

Last year we had a warm, clear day to pick apples for fun. This year it started to rain heavily as soon as we got there. It rained for so long that we gave up on the idea of venturing into the orchard, and instead had lunch under a large tent: a combination of apple doughnuts, some food we’d brought, and apple cider. We bought a bag of Fuji apples before leaving. Not a bad visit, but not worth driving an hour for.

En route home, I was determined to see something new, so I took a slight detour and stopped at Woodstock, Illinois, to take a look at its historic courthouse square in the drizzle. Unusually, the square doesn’t contain the courthouse—former courthouse, in this case—but is a park. The former courthouse is across the street from the park, on the northern edge of the square.

It’s a handsomely restored 19th-century brick building, now housing an art gallery, a restaurant (in the former jail) and the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum. Only $2 to get in that museum, but the family was waiting in the car during my inspection of the inside of the former courthouse, so I merely looked in. Even when I was a kid, Dick Tracy seemed like a comic in amber, so I didn’t feel a great urge to go in. Someday I’ll go, maybe, just for curiosity’s sake.