Effingham Illinois; Camp Lakewood Campground; Terre Haute Indiana Day Trip

After a couple of weeks of exploring our old haunts in Indiana and visiting with family, we drove the 4 hour trip over to Illinois. Effingham is south central in the state and is located on the junction of two major interstates: I-70 and I-57. Our route was quite easy through Lafayette to Ind-231 down to I-74 to Illinois then to I-57 south.

Effingham was selected only because it was at a good stopping distance midway to get to our next destination in Missouri. We like to travel for about 4 hours on our travel or re-positioning days and then stay for a week. Some locations have tons of things to see and do while others not so much. This location falls into the latter category.

Our campground was Camp Lakewood Campground, just on the edge of town on Lake Pauline. We had a good sized pull through site with plenty of shade trees. This campground has the cleanest and best restroom and showers that we have seen while on the road. They also have a lounge open each afternoon to 10 pm maybe. The only downside was it was all gravel with very few grassy areas. We would stay there again when passing through.

Our campsite. Good afternoon shape and a fire ring used when it got down to 43 one night.

While we were in Effingham, we celebrated Trish’s birthday after attending church on Sunday September 3rd. We found a very nice farm to table restaurant called the Firefly Grill. This was an excellent place located right on a lake. Our table was next to the window overlooking the lake. A great Sunday brunch.

The Firefly Grill in Effingham with the birthday girl

After an appetizer of squash blossoms that was excellent, the dinner did not disappoint.

During our stay we kept watching the weather updates for Irma since we still have some family on both coasts of Florida. They all decided to shelter in place in condos that were built to withstand hurricanes. Our family did come through fine with only some minor damage, but had a few days without power and water.

One of the early stage predictions that proved to be very accurate.

The last few years, we have vacationed in the Florida Keys and Key West. It is disturbing at the amount of damage the middle keys sustained and we hope they are able to recover at some point. We love the laid back island type atmosphere in Key West. I’m sure that we will return again one of these days.

Since we did not find much to do in Effingham, we took a couple of day trips back over the border into Indiana. On I-70 it is only about an hour drive. Terre Haute is where I was born and lived until I was 16 years old. Terre Haute has a somewhat sorted, but interesting past dating back to 1853. The loss of many large manufacturing companies has obviously hurt their local economy and there appears to be many depressed areas. My nephew said that real estate is very affordable in town. Like a mansion type home for $250k. Would TH be a possible retirement home for us? Interesting thought to return here after relocating around the country. One of the objectives of our RV travels is to find a locale to purchase a retirement home. Probably not TH though as it does not meet all of our requirements.

After we ate our packed lunch, and visited the Terre Haute History Museum, the house on Fenwood Ave that I grew up in and my grandparents house on 4th street. We also visited with a cousin and an aunt and uncle who I had not seen in 30 years or more. We also met family at one of the best coffee shop that we have seen, the Java Haute.