Cave In Rock, Illinois- Our First Experience In A Dry Town

Our next camping spot was in this town called Cave in Rock, literally in the middle of no where in Illinois. The only reason this town is even on a map is just as the name suggests...there's a cave. In a rock. And I guess people...come to...see it? I still don't really understand the whole thing. Anyways, there were open campsites so we went. The campground itself was actually pretty cool. It was tucked far back in the woods so it actually felt like real camping not RV park camping. (Which I now know, there is a difference.) The camp host was this hot mess of a woman in some gross leopard print nightgown at 3 in the afternoon. Our meeting was awkward, but she did tell us one very important bit of information--Cave in Rock was a dry town. At that point, the fourteen million Jesus signs and churches we had to wade through on the way in made a lot more sense. Dillon and I almost panicked when she assured us there was a town about 10 miles away where we could get booze.

I remember the drive down to the town for two reasons. First was the sunset. I have never seen anything like it. The sun was at least three times larger in the sky than I have ever seen it before in my life, and bright orange/red. It reminded me of those murals of African safaris you see where the sun is just this hot boiling orange thing that takes over the sky. At this point, I can probably apologize for continuously telling you about this cool shit when I have no pictures of it. I'm sorry, I did not take a picture. You'll just have to rely on my picturesque word choice and your creativity. But trust me, that shit was cool.

The second reason was that this was our first encounter with humid fog. This shit on the other hand, not so cool. At first it kind of was because being from Colorado, you never see it get so humid that your windshield fogs up and you can't really do anything about it. But after driving for a while, it gets kind of annoying and you start to look like an idiot as you struggle to wipe of quasi-fog with no luck. We're still struggling with this even now down in the Keys...I'll let you know how that goes.

Wow, sorry that was a super long tangent about absolutely nothing. ANYWAYS, we finally got some liquor and drove our butts back to the campsite, and that's when it happened. The frogs. They come out at night. With a force like you've never seen!!!! Haha, no but really, the frogs were nuts. There were so many of them and they were so loud that we were almost yelling at each other. It was right then and there that I decided the only way I was going to stand a chance in hell at falling asleep that night was to drink myself into oblivion. Sorry mom.

See that pot of spaghetti? Yep. It came right back up later that night. It was the second most disturbing puke I've ever taken right behind the one in front of the church the day after my birthday. (Brandon and Kelsi will attest to that.) After puking my guts out, Dillon says that I proceeded to lay in the tent, whining and crying in my sleeping bag that I couldn't fall asleep because I was spinning. Dillon said it was the only time he's ever seen someone spin when they were already laying on the floor. Needless to say, when I finally did fall asleep at whatever hour and woke up the next morning staring at a pile of completely undigested spaghetti noodles all over the ground, a few things became undeniably apparent to me:
1) I cannot, no matter how much I believe I can in the moment, drink as much as Dillon.
2) Frogs are some loud mothers, a problem I now feel is better resolved with earplugs, not alcohol.
3) I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to eat spaghetti again.

Everything else aside, I can now cross one very important thing off of the bucketlist: "Get so drunk in a dry country that you puke right back in it's sheltered little face."