I know a lot of folks will opt to meet up with the Saturday morning caravan to Road America (or just head to RA directly) and skip on the Friday night owner meet, but if anyone in southern WI is going to the Friday meet, I think it would be fun to form a small band of traveling MINIs!

My plan right now is to make a fun Friday afternoon of motoring. Here's the route I've come up with (subject to improvements). It pretty much avoids highways and interstates and the scenery should be lovely. (At the very least, it should avoid all the major construction zones.) Yes, it is a long route, but there's always the opportunity to pick up more MINIs along the way. In a way, I like to think of this as a small version of MTTS '06.

The route near Lake Geneva partially overlaps with the route taken for this year's Spring Drive. The scenery through McHenry County around Wonder Lake/Bull Valley/Crystal Lake also makes for fun motoring.

After passing through Crystal Lake, the route hops over to Fort Sheridan in Lake County. This will be an official rendezvous point/rest stop with the suburban-area folks. The route then follows Sheridan Rd through some posh suburbs (often run by the Chicago club for a short, fun twisty section).

After the twisty section, there's a short hop to Green Bay Rd. (there's some construction on Sheridan as you get nearer to Chicago) and then back to Sheridan and to Northwestern University for another rendezvous point with city-area MINIs. The route continues down Sheridan into the city limits and then onto Lake Shore Drive, Wacker Drive (lower or upper, depending on people's preferences) and then to the UIC campus.

If anyone's interested or has ideas on how to improve this, post up! There are natural meetup points at the Big Bend Park and Ride at I-43 and 164 and another Park and Ride at Genoa City by the state line.

 

Anthony,

Are you going down just for Friday evening, and then heading back? If so, I may be up for caravaning down with you. I'm not planning on staying Friday night.

Keep me posted!

Thanks,
Ed

 

I will be most likely staying with my parents in Chicago and go on the Saturday morning drive to RA. (I really want to see how they're going to stage the MINIs in Lincoln Park...)