Zion, Illinois

Last summer, I rode a bicycle from Chicago, IL to Devil's Lake, ND. Since I've never written about the adventure, and since it was a long December as far as temperatures went, I thought January might be a good time to talk about summer 2008. January is Bike Month at the Drawing Board.

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The whole thing started in a town called Zion, Illinois. We rode in a van out of Lafayette, past acres of wind farms, picked up a vagabond* outside of a Crate & Barrel in Chicago, and an hour later, we were at a small church in a place caleld Zion.

* Not really. It was Paul.

Zion was one of those Christian-planned communities. The streets were all named after Biblical figures, and our trek included rides down Samuel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah streets. The signs on the outskirts of town pointed toward Chicago and Milwaukee, but read, "SODOM and GOMORRAH."*

* Of course that's not true. The place wasn't that uptight. They had liquor stores and everything.

A decade ago, the town was a hub of industry, incorporating a state of the art nuclear energy plant that brought prosperity, money, and most importantly jobs. At some point, nuclear energy got itself a bad name, the place shut down, and took hundreds of jobs with it. Zion, Illinois was far more like the Zion of The Matrix than the Zion of the Bible.

The town itself wasn't even distantly reminiscent of the pearly gates legends have come to suggest. Still, for that night it was home. We ate too much pizza*, slept on the floor, and woke early to help the church make 5000 paper fans for distribution at Zion's next parade. The arthritis of that morning** would affect me far longer than the miles on my legs.

* Too much pizza is one of my new favorite dishes.

** Again, not true. And like so many of my stories, the moral is this - they're only good stories when I make up the endings.

We rode out that morning and said goodbye to that town as so many already had.  We found Lake Michigan, took some couple pictures, and soon, we were free of Illinois altogether. I'd never been to Wisconsin before.