Operation: Iowa III (Part 1)

I'm not going to follow any sort of chronological rendering to this tale of my tour, because then it would get boring for me. So you, dear reader, are going to have to pay attention to my timeline shifts if you require that sort of thing from your narratives.

That said, I start at the end of the trip. Well, almost the end. The afternoon/evening of April 21. I rolled into Flora, IL around 4:00 CDT that day, followed Route 45 into town until I came to what I perceived to be a main intersection. I made a left and started driving down a road that seemed very familiar to me. (Note to everyone except my brother: It has been nearly 21 years since I've been in this little town, so I'm driving around expecting that pretty much everything has changed since last I was there.) I go maybe a mile down this main drag, full of non-chain stores, and to my absolute and utter amazement, I see the playground my parents and grandparents took me & my brother to going back as far as I can remember.

It's called the Flora Kiwanis Park now (I don't know if it was called that then or not), and with the exception of an addition to the side of the park away from the tennis courts, it's exactly as I remember it.

Linc will get a kick out of these pics... Unless the rest of you spent your childhood summers in this town, they won't mean a hill of beans to you. Tough. Pictures of the park...

Rocket1: Remeber this bitchin' playset? I cannot even believe it's still here in all its glory! As I was taking pictures, I kept muttering to myself, "I can't believe I'm walking around in this park." Talk about surreal.
Merry-go-Round: I don't know if this jives with your memory, but the colors that I saw last week in this place are exactly like I remember them. If anything, the park looks better now than it did in 1984. But dude, didn't this merry-go-round kick ass?
Bench: I remember this bench. More specificially, I remember [insert name of dead relative here] sitting on this bench waiting waiting waiting for us to get done monkeying around on the...
ROCKET2: Here it is... all 150 feet of it, or however long and tall (and tall) this MFer is.

Flora, Illinois may be a run-down little town (in the sense that industry used up the town and moved on decades ago), but the kids of Flora need to know that they've got the most bitchass place to play in all of Downstate. (That distinction would have gone to the equally run-down Effingham, were the most bitchass indoor amusement park, Lincoln Land, still open.)

Next time: 322 Hemlock Road.