Chicago area routing advice

[Neos2]

Looking for a little help here, routing my way home through caches.

 

We are attending a wedding the end of this month and plan to do a little caching on our way home. The wedding is very near Summitt on Archer Ave and we will be staying in Countryside. We will do some caching around Oak Park because we are familiar with that area already and have a cache we particularly want to do there, but we don't know much about Countryside and the area south and southeast of there.

 

Our last trip to Chicago we had cached around Oak Park and then wandered up to Racine to grab a Kringle. We planned to do Resurrection Mary (GCGZJH) and then go grab the A.P.E. cache (GC1596) on our way home. Well, we didn't plan for traffic or nasty weather! We did manage to get to Resurrection Mary, but it was too dark, too cold, and too raw by the time we were done with it to do the A.P.E. cache--we thought we'd just do it the next time we were up (Bad idea, huh?). If I'd only known then what I know now, we'd have gotten the A.P. E. cache first. Oh well, so it goes.

 

But that leads me to my questions....

 

The wedding is Friday night, we plan to hang out and cache in the Oak Park to Countryside part of town on Saturday, and head out early on Sunday toward home --eventually we need to hook up with I-65 in Indiana to get home. How would we do for time on our way out of town is we cache our way out of town along smaller roads, say maybe run down through the caches in Palos Hills/Park/Heights areas and then Oak Forest toward 80 and then jump on 80 when we start running out of time. In other words, how's traffic in that part of town compared to the major highways?

 

Any directions we want to avoid because we will hit bad traffic? Really bad parking? Etc.

 

Any advice appreciated!

[+Greenback]

I don't think you'll have any parking issues unless you end up in a Cook County forest preserve which has it's parking lot chained. They don't keep some of their parking lots open in the winter but I don't have any first hand knowledge of any which are closed in the area you're heading.

 

You could certainly drive all the way down 50 and find lots of caches along the way. It's a four lane road with a traffic light probably every mile or less but I've driven it many many times while caching and didn't find the traffic to be a problem.

 

I'm sure there are others who could offer more suggestions.

[Neos2]

You could certainly drive all the way down 50 and find lots of caches along the way. It's a four lane road with a traffic light probably every mile or less but I've driven it many many times while caching and didn't find the traffic to be a problem.

 

I appreciate that input. I took a look at 50--not many caches along it.

However, along 43, there are many caches. You know anything about that route? Looks from the map like the same sort of road (but oh how looks can be deceiving!).

[Neos2]

All righty then Chicago-cachers, y'all KNOW what happened last time y'all let me wander around all-y'alls lil ol town without much in the way of advice...

 

For those of you who don't know, my belove N1 dropped a pretty-dang-new-cache down a fence post AND ripped his pants wide open from knee to knee at the same time at one cache we went to, my sister-in-law managed to tear up a key-safe container and we had to hike to the nearest CVS to buy a replacement one, that didn't look anything like the first one (can you imagine yourself going to do maintenance on your cache and finding a new container) and we otherwise terrorized the town until we thought for usre they'd never let us come back to cache there again.

 

Whew! How's that for a run-on sentence! Unless someone talks me out of it, I plan to stick to my original plan to cache my way back down to 80 from Countryside, probably through the eastern edge of the densest caches south of Countryside.

 

If I get lost in the Forest Preserve, who should I call? 501 gang, will you come to Chicago to rescue me?