Joliet ... First unscheduled stop

Joliet was the first city where we got out of the car.

 Over the two weeks prior to the trip, we had spent a few days plotting out ideas of where to stop and what to do on the way.  We'd made a list of possible places to see in a notebook.  Naturally, when we hit the road, that notebook was back in Chicago.  So, we made a few unexpected stops.  Joliet was the first of our impromptu pauses along the way.

Joliet has a lovely system of Visitor Center signs that guide you through town on the highway.  And they have a park that you come upon when you first hit the city limits.  We stopped there.  The park includes an ice cream shop.  It's a lovely little store.  We considered stopping for ice cream, but we decided to wait for sweets/food for a bit.  We did  take a few photos, though.

Note how the Blues Brothers are dancing on the roof of the ice cream store!  Gwen has never seen "The Blues Brothers", and it's been well over 2 decades since I've seen the movie.  Gwen doesn't really know or care about them at all, and I didn't have a lot to tell her about them to pique her interest.  And yet, I felt I should point them out, nevertheless.  That's not really a good story, but there it is anyway...

Across the street from the park (which we came to discover is technically an arboretum) is a towing service that keeps a parking lot full of vehicles that are all representative of the characters in the movie "Cars".  I'm pretty sure that the movie is the only reason for those specific cars being there.  We also had our own members of the "Cars" cast with us.  You'll be seeing them periodically throughout the blog.  I have a Lightning McQueen car that I'm taking with me, and Gwen has a 'Mater truck with her.  They cars seem to be having a good time thus far.  The two cars (die cast, obviously) were gifts to us from Ali upon our departure.

This entire trip has been in the works since Gwen saw "Cars" at the age of 7-ish.  So, it is appropriate that we are making them a part of the trip.

There are cool info signs throughout the state of Illinois.  We saw our first one in Joliet.  We didn't realize that there were two sides of the signs at this point.  So, we missed the Joliet specific info on this one.