I’ve never had a fight with my BFF Crystal! We’ve been friends since 7th grade. We just celebrated our 55th birthdays! We’re both Leo’s…whatever that means. We’ve cried together, we’ve laughed & laughed & laughed & laughed until we cried & cried! We’ve gotten ourselves into so many predicaments…lost, stuck, stranded, lost, bad dates! We always have so much fun together! The one thing we haven’t done together is hike. Since I started hiking, I’ve been trying to get her to go with Russ and I. But it never worked out with her schedule. Until our sort of annual road trip to Ottawa Illinois Riverfest. The Riverfest is a great weekend (for us) of live bands and local food! The drive up is just as fun as the stay in Ottawa! This year was going to be extra special. Our favorite tribute band, and the reason we started going to Riverfest, Silver Bullet STL A Tribute to Bob Seger (Bob Seger is the reason I live and breathe 💖) was playing Saturday night which happened to be Crystal’s birthday! What a perfect way to celebrate! And, there is a state park just a few miles from Ottawa, Starved Rock State Park, that has fabulous hiking trails, or so I’ve been told. So we made plans to do some hiking on Friday and Saturday during the day and we’d rock out to the bands at night. Sounds simple, right? I forgot to mention that Crystal and I are easily distracted! On our first road trip to Ottawa, we ended up getting lost with the help of GPS Kelly (we both know a Kelly we don’t like & we didn’t like the GPS when the snarky voice got her name!) in the little town of Atlanta Illinois trying to find a gas station that was open! In the process we found a giant man holding a hot dog with feet on Route 66! OMG, we laughed until we cried!

Isn’t that thing creepy?! What in the heck does it mean? We were too busy laughing to think about investigating. Of course, we’re talking about giant man on this trip again and there on the side of the highway is a giant man and a lot of other giant beings! We had to go back and check them out.

Needless to say we were cracking up! There were so many giant beings there, but we decided to go with a theme…We Like Big Men and We Can Not Lie…posted it on Facebook along with the original giant man picture. The comments were hilarious! Our next stop was for gas, yep…in Atlanta! We didn’t realize it was the same little town at first until we saw the sign for the library. We drove around and sure enough, there was giant man with a hot dog with feet! Turns out, the feet are really his fingers and thumb! I still don’t know the significance of this giant man with a giant hot dog but there was a girl named Crystal selling hot dogs from a cart on the sidewalk by him. A guy offered to take our picture together next to giant man.

You guessed it, another picture was added to our theme Facebook post! Our friends think we’re still as nuts as we were back in the 70’s! Maybe they just wish they were having so much silly who cares fun?! We’re driving through the cute little town of Utica illinois and there on the side of the road, yep another big man…of sorts! Oh man were we glad I turned around and went back for that photo opp! Happy Birthday Crystal!

You just have to stop when you see a pepto-bismol pink sasquatch wearing an apron with a cupcake on it! He’s the lure for Two Girls and a Cupcake. The best cupcakes I’ve ever tasted! (Yes Crystal, my Jilly’s cupcake that you got me for my birthday was wonderful 💜💜) we went to that dang shop 3 times! Talking about a sugar high! Yikes! Here’s the Facebook page link to their page https://www.facebook.com/twogirlsandacupcakeinc

Yes, we did hike! Starved Rock State Park was insane busy! They have overflow parking lots…for a park that’s mostly about hiking! I couldn’t believe the cars! The people walking to…I don’t know! We weren’t about to park in an overflow lot then walk forever to the park HQ just to find out we had already passed the trailhead. It reminded me of trying to get into 6 Flags! Not the way I like to hike…too many people. We headed to another park, Matthiessen State Park. Again, overflow parking lots but not nearly as many cars or people. But still a lot. At the trailhead…stairs! It looked like thousands of stairs! I hate stairs! Not gonna happen late on Friday afternoon after driving for hours. We decided to just go listen to music and hike somewhere in the morning.  Feeling a little bummed we headed back to the hotel on a different road and saw a sign…Illinois Canyon Trail. That was one I wanted to do at Stared Rock! WOOHOO! We found a trail, only 2 cars in the parking lot and it was just about 2 miles in and back. We didn’t have much daylight left so this was perfect for our first hike together! It was easy, relatively flat terrain. But we were really going into a canyon! It was so cool. There was a stream that wound around through the canyon and we had to cross it several times. At the end there was a small waterfall that spilled into a pool. It was so pretty and peaceful. It was a great first hike with my BFF! I’m glad we didn’t do anything harder or longer that day because we ended up needing every ounce of leg & butt muscle we had for our adventure on Saturday morning!