Took a nice ride out in the FAR west burbs of Chicago today. A friend told me about a nice road near his house, so we went to check it out.

The road is Shabbona Rd/Chicago Rd between Paw Paw & Shabbona, IL. You can take Route 30 west to Shabbona, go south & west on Shabbona Rd/Chicago Rd - go through Paw Paw, get on 39 south to Route 34 (Ogden), then run Ogden east all the way back in.

On Chicago Rd, just west of Rt 39, there is a windmill farm. You can take a gravel road and get right in the middle of them. For some reason, it's a very cool experience. These things are HUGE! Doing some web research, I found out they are 214' tall with 85' blades! Damn!


More info on them here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendota_Hills_Wind_Farm

 

Your right on there Evil, they're almost hypnotizing. I just looked at the new plans for these things and they are putting another 128 of these things in southern Dekalb county, between Gurler Rd. and Rt. 30. Next time your in my neck of the woods. give me a shout...

 

PM me your cell # or something. We rarely know where we're going, or where we'll end up. A lot of times it starts with something like "Never been down this road before - wonder where it goes". ... or, we just go in a general direction - take this road west until it ends, turn, turn again at the next road going west.

Did you go to any of the stuff going on in Woodstock & McHenry today?

We're hitting the swap meet in Peotone tomorrow.

 

oh by the way, each blade is 48 feet long. i've seen them go down Rt. 47 all day long while working down there. They hook some wheels to the blade and pull it with a Semi..

 

No I had to work today and tommarow too, but hey... I'm not complaining about having to work with the way things are going on now adays... I'll pm you my cell

 

48' blades seems more right to me. Dunno how accurate the Wiki info is. I was surprised to read they are 214' tall. Comparing them to the nearby buildings, trees and being up close, my guess was they were something like 80'-90' tall.

 

Thanks for the tip on the road . .always looking for a nice place to ride that doesn't take me 3-4 hours to get to!

FWIW - We have a huge farm of those down here just east of Bloomington (35-40 miles of them) and the generator heads perched on the top of those posts are bigger than my Excursion. From what I understand a man can stand upright inside those to do maintenance.