Hays Days and Kell

We've talked about doing it for a while & finally just did it! We threw overnight stuff in a bag & headed to southern Illinois. The goal was pretty vague - see if we could find my families old haunts.
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I'm fairly confident we did find my grandparents house from when I was a kid in Kell. But I didn't get a great forward shot of it - because Darwin was like, "Hurry up , this is a small town and they are not going to take kindly to strangers taking pictures."!!


And Darwin has an amazing memory for directions! He had no problem at all finding Dad's property & he had only seen it once...I think it was when we were down there for Grandpa's funeral.
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The land is off of a local road down there - here is the look that I remember when Dad showed it to us back then. Trees and power lines.

Then Darwin drives very slowly & says, "And if I remember right - there's an access road somewhere along here that goes back to the property."

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And sure enough - there it was, completely grown over, but if you looked carefully - you could see it. Darwin put it in 4 wheel drive and started back.

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With all the rain - I was a "little" (ok - more then a little) freaked out!! I could so see us getting stuck out there in the middle of nowhere!!!

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There was drainage ditch to the right - trees to the left & a completely covered, potholed, pitted, "road" we were bumping up and down on at 2 miles an hour!!

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Then he got to some extremely tall "weeds" & I said - just stop here!! You really couldn't tell at that point if the road even continued.

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So - I got out, walked very gingerly through the first part of the weeds, then could go no further.

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Then I just put my camera up above my head and took a series of pictures panning from left to right.

Then we backed out to a point that he could do the back and forth 629 times until he got hte truck pointed back out!

We couldn't find the old homestead & we couldn't find the tree that my Dad loved to show everyone when they visited.

It has made me want to go back down sometime with family to see if we can get pictures of other haunts!

Too bad it won't be with my Dad.....