6 Best Family Hikes in Illinois

I continue to be amazed by all the beauty just outside of our doors. We’ve been exploring more of Illinois the past couple of years and I’m hooked by the family-friendly trails and views! Plus, I love driving on historic Route 66 while we are out exploring! Illinois has 69 State Parks, six state forests and my personal favorite, Shawnee National Forest. These 6 hikes are all within driving distance from St. Louis and you could explore them as a day trip or weekend getaway. 

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Garden of the Gods

GPS Coordinates to the Observation Trail parking lot: 37.604832, -88.384603
While there are multiple trails in this park and nearby, my favorite is the 0.5 mile Observation Trail. The trail starts from the parking lot and it is a loop. I like to start clockwise past the vault toilets. 
The trail starts off in the woods and passes by boulders before breaking open to incredible views! Make sure to keep little ones close, as there are big drops. We like to catch sunrise here and pack along breakfast! It is the best sunrise we have ever seen!! 

Ferne Clyffe State Park

90 Goreville Rd, Goreville, IL 62939
We happened to be here when a huge rain started! There is an incredible waterfall at the end of the 0.8 mile Big Rocky Hollow trail. The waterfall definitely needs a heavy rain to flow!
There are also normally rock climbers along the cliff faces in the park, which my kids loved to watch. 
 

Rim Rock National Recreation Trail

GPS Coordinates to the trailhead: 37.602120, -88.278114
This is one hour from Garden of the Gods, so we like to combine this trail with it when we are in the area. It is a 1 mile trail that meanders through a beautiful canyon. 
There is one slot canyon area that my kids love to fit and run through! The historic cliff cave is just beautiful too. There are some bridges to cross and amazing wilderness that will take your breath away!

Pomona Natural Bridge

GPS Coordinates to the trailhead: 37.648338, -89.343184
This trail is 0.3 miles along a loop. This is such a fun and cool spot, especially walking across the bridge to climb down and explore underneath the bridge. 
We like to bring a picnic lunch to eat under the bridge. It is so peaceful here!

Watershed Nature Center

Address: 1591 Tower Ave, Edwardsville, IL 62025
This is a 1.2 mile trail that is stroller-friendly. We start at the nature center and go clockwise around the pond. About 1/3 mile around the pond, there is a sign for the marsh boardwalk. This unique boardwalk is concrete and has no railings! Definitely watch little ones, but we have had no issues. 
The trail continues around the pond and there are two observation towers to view wildlife. There are so many birds here. We saw many blue herons on our most recent visit! 

Old Chain of Rocks Bridge

Address to the Illinois Side: 4205-4207 Chain of Rocks Rd, Granite City, IL 62040

This historic bridge, once part of Route 66, is a 1 mile trail across the Mississippi River. It is stroller-friendly and check out the new Chain of Rocks Park on the Missouri side. The water intake towers are beautiful to view and keep a lookout for eagles! 

There are so many beautiful places to explore in Illinois. 

We also love Pere Marquette State Park, Salt Lick Point, Starved Rock State Park and Cave in the Rock State Park! 
 
I loved partnering with Enjoy Illinois on this reel! Shout out to USDA for the drone permit of Garden of the Gods!
 
Happy exploring!

Family Adventure in Chicago

Are you looking for a fun family adventure within driving distance from St. Louis? Look no further than Chicago (a 5 hour drive)!! We visited my family in Milwaukee for Thanksgiving this year and wanted to take our daughters to Chicago for a little mini-vacation beforehand. My 5 year old has been wanting to either visit Chicago or South America (she learned about both in school). Out of these two, my husband and I thought Chicago was a little more doable, ha! 

We planned most of our trip with CityPASS, a fantastic way to save money on attractions in lots of cities. This was our four daughters’ first time exploring the city, so we were excited to check out as many attractions and museums as we could fit in. You can save a whopping 48% on regular admission prices, which was so great for our family. I downloaded the free CityPASS app and it was super easy to select my tickets of what attractions we chose. When we arrived at an attraction, I just pulled up our app and we were good to go to show our tickets! 

Our 4-Day Chicago Itinerary

 

Day 1: 

Drove to Chicago 

Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo (free)

The Farm-in-the-Zoo (free) 

Checked into our hotel (Loews Chicago Hotel)

Walked from our hotel to the Shoreline Sightseeing Architecture River Tour

(We timed this just as the sun was setting, which I recommend because the city lights were beautiful)!

 

Day 2: 

Sloomoo Institute 

American Girl Doll Store & Cafe (ate lunch with my girls’ dolls)

Museum of Ice Cream 

Swam in our hotel indoor pool

 

Day 3: 

Skydeck Chicago

The Bean 

Maggie Daley Park

Christkindl Market

 

Day 4: 

Check out of Loews Chicago Hotel

Shedd Aquarium 

Field Museum 

Museum of Science and Industry

Drive to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving!

In this blog, I’ll share 5 of our attractions that we chose through CityPASS. I partnered with CityPASS for this trip, which I was so thankful for. I highly recommend them as a company! Everything was seamless for booking attractions. I’ll share the other attractions in another blog post. 

Shoreline Sightseeing Architecture River Tour

Since this was our girls’ first trip to Chicago, we wanted to choose something that would give them a view of the city. This boat tour was just incredible! Our tour was at 4:45pm, which I highly recommend! We arrived as the sun was setting and then we were blown away by the lights of the city as the boat moved throughout the city. Many buildings had Christmas lights up too! This was a 60 minute tour with a guide speaking through the history and architecture of Chicago. The guide was very knowledgeable and we learned a lot! 

There is a deck on the top of the boat with benches and chairs. We brought out all of our winter gear (my girls wore their snowsuits) and it was really needed with the wind and cooler weather. Stairs lead to the cabin with a cafe to order hot chocolate and some other snacks. There are restrooms around the corner too. At the front of the boat was a small viewing area and you could still hear the guide over the speaker. 

I think my favorite part of the tour was reaching Lake Michigan and then the boat slowly turned for us to take in the view of the whole Chicago skyline at night. It was so incredible!

Skydeck Chicago

We saw Chicago by boat and then Chicago from Willis Tower the next day! Skydeck is located in Willis Tower, which is the third-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. This is the highest observation deck in the United States!! We rode the elevator up to the 103rd floor and then viewed Chicago from the observation windows. Luckily, we had a clear and sunny day, so we saw buildings pretty far out! 

This location was where I was extremely thankful we had the CityPASS. There was an expedited line so we didn’t need to wait in the line for the elevator. After we took our time observing through the windows, we walked to the Ledge (also on the 103rd floor). The Ledge is made up of 5 glass floor balconies with 1.5 inches of thick glass! You can look straight down and see how tall we were–it was crazy! The Ledge is included with admission and there was a separate line for CityPASS holders too! We were able to go to the Ledge three times with our tickets and skip the lines. Each party gets 90 seconds for photos, so it was nice we could go more than once. 

Shedd Aquarium

I have such fond memories of visiting Shedd Aquarium when I was younger. This is the 3rd largest aquarium in the Western Hemisphere (after the Georgia Aquarium & Monterey Bay Aquarium). There are 32,600 different species of sea life at Shedd and you could easily spend all day here! First we walked to the Abbott Oceanarium where we saw Beluga whales swimming close by. You can view the whales and dolphins above water, but you can also take the stairs down to view them from under water! The penguins, sea otters and starfish are downstairs too. 

We saw one of the free Aquatic shows, which happened to be on dolphins! This was a fantastic show. Another favorite section was the Wild Reef. I recommend hopping in line for this right away, because there is an elevator ride to arrive at the Wild Reef. This leads to the sharks in its own underground wing. There are 540 species of life shown in this public display!

Field Museum

Next to Shedd Aquarium is the Field Museum. The Field Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum in Chicago. It is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. It has more than 24 million objects and explores more than 4.6 billion years of history!!

Here are two of our favorite exhibits we saw:

The Evolving Planet:

View SUE, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered! They have both fossils and casts of MANY dinosaurs and animals. The exhibit starts with single-celled organisms and walks through the years and stages of history until early humans. 

Inside Ancient Egypt:

This exhibit explores a burial chamber that dates back to 2400 BC! There are 23 human mummies and 30 animal mummies. There are floor-to-ceiling hieroglyphs too!

Museum of Science and Industry

Located in the only remaining building from the 1893’s World’s Fair, this is the largest science museum in the Western Hemisphere. There are hundreds of exhibits and 35,000 artifacts!! We loved walking beside the WWII German U-Boat (only one of five remaining U-boats in the world) and exploring through the mirror maze. One of the neatest things we did was descend into the mine shaft! We loved learning about the technology and history of coal mining. 

Because we went during the winter season, we loved seeing the “Christmas Around the World” exhibit. There are more than 50 Christmas trees decorated! Each tree is decorated by a different country. It was so interesting to learn about different customs and traditions!

Overall, we just loved these Chicago attractions and museums. I felt like there was so much more to learn and discover here. We can’t wait to return as a family again soon!