Home again, home again, jiggity-jig

I've returned from the wilds of Illinois, unscathed. Kind of hard to become scathed when I'm camping out of a mini-version of home, and I'm only 5 minutes away from the nearest town...just across the bridge.

The Illinois River and Dam, with the home town of my childhood across the way. Big brick building is the defunct Federal Paper, nee, Nabisco.

River view from the bridge's apex.

With the exception of an extremely hot Friday that found me in the cooler confines of the camper, it was a very nice weekend. But of course, my idea of camping is sitting in front of a fire, reading, or this:

And not a stray wi-fi signal in site. See, I was totally "roughing-it"

Saturday night, the humidity finally broke, the biting bugs took a break using me as a smorgasbord, and we watched the sun set and waited for the stars to pop out from the darkening sky. To which I discovered something amazing. Even though I could look up above and see maybe three or four stars (light pollution is a bit of an issue, even at the campground), I could take my binocs and point them towards the heavens. All of a sudden there were hundreds of stars dotting a totally blackened sky. That was the highlight of the weekend, found in the darkness.