Mike's Drive-In

Mike's Drive-In is a must for anyone living or passing through West Frankfort.

What initially drew us in was just that it was something different.  Yes, WF has a Sonic, and McDonalds, and pretty much all the other required fast food crap.  Mike's is not like these.  An original '50's style drive-in, Mike's has all the classics - burgers, onion rings, chili dogs...then you get home made root beer (best around!)  What keeps us coming back (every Friday, to be exact) are the horse shoes and pork tenderloin sandwiches.  We are from the Springfield area, and both these things are hard to find outside of there.  What's better, is they are actually good!  Especially the horseshoes, which come is several varieties with homemade cheese sauce - hamburger, pork, or turkey.

The service here is nothing short of excellent, another reason we always return.  It didn't take long to make friends with the waitresses (especially Krystal and Angie.) They are always super friendly, and if you come back often enough, know your favorite orders. :)

They have indoor seating (with awesome retro decor!), an outdoor patio with bench seats, and traditional curb side eat in dining.

I highly recommend taking a trip to Mikes, which is open most evenings until 8, closing a little earlier on Sundays.  You can find the whole menu here: http://www.urbanspoon.com/cities/171-illinois/restaurants/983219-mikes-drive-in/menu (great prices!!)

Mike's Drive-In
1007 W Main St,
West Frankfort, IL 62896
(618) 932-2564

Directions:

Take I-55 to the West Frankfort exit and head into town.  Right off the interstate on the North side of the road.

Ghost Dance Canyon

Ghost Dance Canyon at Dixon Springs is undoubtedly one of the best 'trails' in Southern Illinois.  I use the word trail lightly, as there is only about half a mile of distinguishable trail.  It starts just beyond the swimming pool, running underneath the highway in a fairly impressive arched bridge.

Follow the foot path along a bubbling stream, with many places for you to stop and play in or near the water and it's various little waterfalls.

The trail basically ends at a large confluence of rocks in the stream, nestled in an opening of a canyon.  It's pretty impressive already.

Cross the stream (carefully!) and there's a footpath following the water and bluff line for about a quarter of a mile.  Being as it's fall and there's a ton of leaves on the ground, we couldn't tell if the trail went any further, but some people up ahead of us turned up on top of the bluff line, while we went down to the water.

We then made our way back up to the main crossing via the stream.  It was incredible.  Rocks as big as houses stand in the stream.

There are little waterfalls everywhere, making this a cascade fall.  If you are not an experienced hiker, I do not recommend climbing among the rocks.  Although, if you are experienced enough to do it, it's an experience you won't soon forget.  There were numerous times that we just sat on a large rock and surveyed the scene before us.  This is God in all His glory.

Directions:

Follow directions in my last post to Dixon Springs State Park.  Park at the swimming pool, walk to the front of it where the building is, and turn to the right.  Follow the trail!

Dixon Springs State Park

Dixon Springs State Park is one of several state parks in the Illinois Shawnee Hills. The park is on a giant block of rock which was dropped 200 feet along a fault line that extends northwesterly across Pope County.  The area around the park was occupied by various tribes of Algonquins who, after the Shawnee had been driven from Tennessee, settled near the mouth of the Wabash River. Dixon Springs was one of their favorite camping grounds and was called "Kitchemuske-nee-be" for the Great Medicine Waters.  One of the better-known Indian Trails, which the early French called the "Grand Trace," passed to the west of the park and south to Fort Massac, then branched out into lesser trails. Much of the "Grand Trace" is IL Rt.145, one of the most scenic highways in the state, running nearly all of its length south from Harrisburg through the Shawnee National Forest.  This section of the state was part of an Indian Reservation occupied for a time by about 6,000 Native Americans. Like the buffalo, most of the Indians were gone by the early 1830s.

Dixon Springs takes its name from William Dixon, one of the first white settlers to build a home in this section, who obtained a school land warrant in 1848 from Governor Augustus C. French. His cabin was a landmark for many years as was an old log church on the adjoining knoll.  A small community grew up at Dixon Springs with a general store, post office, blacksmith shop, grist mill and several churches.  Three of the churches are together on a circle drive in the middle of the park, but beyond cabins and the DNR offices, there are no other buildings left within the park.

Dixon Springs became a 19th century health spa which attracted hundreds to the seven springs of mineral-enriched water. A bathhouse provided mineral or soft water baths, hot or cold, available at any time. The natural beauty of the area and its interesting stone formations helped to give the park valley a more equable temperature in the summer than most of southern Illinois. This made the resort so popular that people came to Golconda by steamboat excursions from as far away as Paducah, KY, Evansville, IN, and Cairo. From Golconda they then traveled by train to within a couple miles of the park.  There were nine named springs within the park, three of which we'd found, all of which (to my knowledge) have been capped, some with springhouses  around them and spigots for the water to flow out.


One of the oldest artifacts in the park is the Rainbow Lake dam north and upstream from the pool. Whitesides (one of the sites many owners) built it sometime in the 1890s and created a small lake where there was fishing and canoeing. Today the lake has silted in, but the rock wall dam is still visible below the youth camp.  A series of trails begin at the dam, and you can walk both on the top rim of it as well as in the canyon it creates.

There is a pool, bathhouse, many camping facilities, ans several parks and recreational areas within the park.  Across the street is the Chocolate Factory (which I posted about earlier on the blog page.)  Within a quarter mile South is a section of the Trail of Tears.  I have to admit though, it is just a paved road with houses on it, which we did not find to be very thrilling.

Directions:

Dixon Springs State Park is located in Pope County, just 30 miles south of Harrisburg, IL, or 20 miles north of Paducah, Ky. To reach Dixon Springs State Park from I-24 traveling East, take exit #16 to Rt. 146. At the stop sign turn left and the park is 13 miles on the left. If you are traveling West on I-24 you take exit #16 to Rt. 146. At the stop sign turn right and the park entrance is 13 miles on the left. The park entrance sign is across from the Chocolate Factory. Dixon Springs State Park is 1 mile east of Rt. 145.

Millstone Bluff

This one was an unplanned visit.  We went to Dixon Springs and spent the day, then on the way home had extra time, and it was on the way and not far at all.  I had looked at it online, and was interested, so we kind of killed two birds with one stone.

This is a really neat place, but in the fall it is really hard to see what is there.  We could barely make out part of what I thought was the stone wall, and only one grave was visible.  There are a few indentations where the homes where, and we could see the hollow where the meeting hall was.  On the other hand, Southern Illinois really is prettiest in the Fall.  Still, I suggest planning on coming to this particular site in Spring or Summer.

Millstone Bluff is the site of an unplowed prehistoric Mississippian village, stonebox cemetery, and rock art site, as well as a Late Woodland stone fort.  It was so named because the early settlers in the area carved milling stones along the base of the northwestern edge of the bluff. These hand carved millstones were used to mill local farmers' grains into flour.  This is actually at the parking lot and the first thing you see.

The inhabitants of Millstone Bluff lived in semi-subterranean houses. They excavated rectangular holes in the ground and then excavated deep (approximately two feet deep) trenches along the exterior of the pit. Upright posts were placed in trenches and smaller branches were woven in and out of the upright posts similar to a basket. The walls were then packed with clay to make it cool in the summer and warm in the winter.   You can still see where some of these houses used to be, only they aren't rectangular anymore, where the walls cave in after the home is abandoned, the dirt that fills in the space makes it an oval shape instead.  There is also a large packed down area which was used as a 'public square' where still no trees grow, and a much larger home shaped area that they used as a meeting house.

Charcoal was taken from wall logs yielding Carbon 14 dates from 1350-1510, indicating the site was occupied relatively late in prehistory. To put the prehistoric occupation at Millstone Bluff into correct context, the site was being occupied after Columbus's "discovery" of the New World (1492) and before Hernando De Soto's 1540 march through the southeastern United States.  Why did they live up here on this bluff? We still don't know why they were living up on Millstone Bluff. However, given the late date of this site, it may be that there may have been warfare in Southern Illinois during this time period and they were living in this fairly inaccessible location for protection.


Further down the trail is a bluff where they carved a thunderbird and other animals.  As you loop back around there is a cemetery, but all the graves had been looted many many years before, and nothing is left but the empty stone lined graves.

This is a half mile trail, but it is straight uphill on the way up the bluff, so prepare to be winded by the time you get to the top.  It follows the circle of the bluff, then winds back down the original path.  


Directions:

From I-57 South 
Take exit 44 to merge onto I-24 E toward Nashville
Take exit 16 for IL-146 toward Vienna/Golconda
Turn left onto IL-146 E
Turn left onto IL-147 E
Turn left at the Millstone Bluff sign.