Earlier this month I was on a trip to Illinois in the US and inspired by my shepherd’s hut stay in Devon, I took the opportunity to stay in a cabin on a small farm well away from the cities. “The Little Red Cabin” is on a hobby farm just outside the town of Lena in northwest Illinois, only a few miles south of the border with Wisconsin.
It was built only a few years ago and is a timber framed building with wood siding and a corrugated metal roof. It’s very well insulated, finished to a high quality, and well thought-out.
There’s a full height living room area and then at the back a kitchen area, a small double bedroom, a bathroom, and then a ladder up to a sleeping loft with two single mattresses. Naturally I took the chance to use the sleeping loft for the two nights I was there! After all, I can sleep in a normal bedroom any time. Sleeping lofts are a common feature of traditional log cabins too and in winter really benefit from the warm air rising. All the heating in the Little Red Cabin is electric, but outside there is a fire pit and chairs. The last photo shows one of the fields for the farm’s Highland Cattle.
I went into Lena for supplies from the local Sullivans’ family run supermarket. On the outskirts is the Lena Brewing Company, and the landscape is otherwise just dotted with farms and the steel cylinders of huge grain elevators. In town I visited the Northwest Illinois Air Combat memorial with its newly installed F-4 Phantom jet fighter. I remember when the RAF’s Phantoms were replaced by Tornadoes in the 1980s. The memorial is on Lena’s Main Street, shown in the street scene. Low-rise, wide streets, low density of buildings, everything the immediate area needs, and everyone I interacted with was polite. Like one of our villages, away from our atomised anonymous cavernous cities.
I spent the second day without using the car. About half an hour’s walk along dirt-track country lanes is the Lake Le-Aqua-Na State Park. Some of the views on the way could have been English fields with streams and little copses; but look another way and the agricultural buildings give it away.
The state park is 700 acres centred on a 40 acre lake formed by damming a small river. Mostly forested with broadleaves, although this time of year it was starting to look bare. As usual in the US, there were plenty of facilities, including somewhere for anglers to buy bait even, and shelters for picnics and parties, with a place to have a barbecue. They always seem to accommodate outdoor cooking, compared to our obsessive “no fires!” signs in parks.
Back on the cabin porch, I spotted a gray squirrel, happily nibbling on a nut and presumably not doing any harm in its native ecosystem. I was equally happy escaping the cold rain that finally arrived, splitting my time between sitting by the windows and writing (solid WiFi too, by the way.) At dusk I closed the curtains, had something to eat, and then watched a couple of films including Oppenheimer. After 10pm I decided to look out into the darkness, partially illuminated by the lights on the front of the cabin, and saw it had snowed!
I went out and took some photos in case it thawed by morning but I needn’t have worried. I took some more pictures the next day before leaving, including one of the farm’s cows and a quick drive through the state park, now clothed in snow and frost.
I really benefitted from this short break after a busy week. It was extremely peaceful and the snow fall gave a taste of winter after my autumn day in the state park and countryside. Lena has enough to keep you going for an even longer stay, and there are more substantial towns less than half an hour’s drive away. I was tempted to stay quite frankly, but I braved the icy-winged planes and the air traffic disruption of the federal shutdown to get myself back to the UK and Century Wood.