Champaign-Urbana

Driving in from the interstate, Lia and I watched Illinois farmland run flat and green in every direction for nearly an hour before Champaign-Urbana appeared almost without warning, a cluster of bell towers and stadium lights breaking the horizon line. The twin cities blur into one another at their shared border, but they keep distinct characters — Champaign louder and more commercial, Urbana quieter and more residential, both organized around the sprawling University of Illinois campus that employs, educates, or otherwise touches nearly everyone here. We arrived on a football Saturday and got swept into a sea of orange and blue before we’d even found parking.

The quad and campustown

The Main Quad at the University of Illinois is a genuinely handsome piece of American campus architecture, its long lawn framed by limestone buildings including the Alma Mater statue, where students traditionally pose for graduation photos beneath her outstretched arms. We wandered through Campustown’s blocks of coffee shops and record stores afterward, stopping at a used bookstore that seemed to stock more back issues of literary magazines than any shop that size had a right to. Lia pointed out that the whole area has the particular energy of a college town that’s been doing this for a hundred and fifty years and has gotten quite good at it.

Prairie and farm-to-table

What struck us most, though, was how quickly the university city gives way to open prairie. A short drive out of town, Meadowbrook Park preserves a swath of restored tallgrass prairie, waist-high grasses and wildflowers rippling in the wind the way this whole region once looked before it became the country’s cornfield. We ate dinner one night at a farm-to-table spot downtown that sourced nearly everything from farms we’d driven past that same afternoon, and I don’t think sweet corn has ever tasted quite that fresh to me before or since — picked, it turned out, that same morning.

Getting There

Willard Airport, just south of Savoy, offers a handful of direct flights on regional carriers, though most visitors fly into Chicago O’Hare or Midway and make the two-and-a-half to three-hour drive south on I-57 and I-74. Amtrak’s Illini and Saluki lines also connect Champaign-Urbana to Chicago in about two and a half hours, arriving downtown within walking distance of campus. Once there, the campus core and downtown Champaign are walkable or bikeable, though a car helps for reaching the surrounding prairie parks and farm stands.