Two Weeks in Bloomington, IL
Grand Rapids, MI to Bloomington, IL | 2 Weeks in Bloomington | September 2025
With our rental car all packed up, we said our goodbyes to Curtis’ parents and our van and hit the road for our 6th outage season. This fall would be bringing us to two outages, starting with Bloomington, Illinois. It was only a 4 hour drive from Curtis’ parents, but naturally we turned it into 6 in pursuit of Indiana counties. It was a quick and smooth drive in our rental car, and we arrived in Bloomington in the late afternoon. After settling into our hotel, we went out for groceries and pizza from The Pinsaria, and geared up for what would be over 5 weeks straight of Curtis working 12+ hours every day.
Our time here started out rough, with both of us coming down with a cold right away. I hadn’t been sick in almost two years, and was super bummed to end that streak. But by the end of the week, we were feeling better, just in time for me to have some visitors!
Whenever we are at jobs in Illinois, I always try to convince my family to come hang out with me, offering to get them a hotel room using our points, and this time my mom and sister took me up on the offer and came over for the weekend with my niece and nephew! It was such a fun and busy weekend, filled with time in the pool, at the nearby park, shopping, and just hanging out around the hotel. The kids are at the age where they don’t need much more than a hotel with a pool to have a great time, anything else was just icing on the cake — like their first taste of Krispy Kreme donuts. This fell right in the middle of the 2+ months that we would be away from Iowa, and was just what I needed: getting to see the kids who are growing up way too fast, and being able to catch up with my mom and sister. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to show them around some of the other Illinois towns we’ve come to love!
Besides that, we ended up really enjoying our time here. The outage went well for Curtis, and I liked the hotel and area where we were staying. We were right next to the State Farm campus, which had plenty of walking trails around the lake and that connected with other trails and parks in our corner of the city. I knew going into this that it would be hard to go through these longer days alone without Charlotte — besides not having her company, she also was always good at keeping me on a schedule, helping me break up the days by going for periodic walks and spending time sitting outside. I tried to implement my own routine, with taking periodic breaks throughout the day to go outside and go for walks, and set an alarm on my phone to remind me when Jeopardy! Was on everyday.
We learned that Bloomington is the home of State Farm Insurance and Biaggis Italian restaurants — naturally, we had to eat at Biaggis while we were here. We also tried several other restaurants that we enjoyed, our favorites being the Signature Cafe and Kobe Revolving Sushi. We didn’t expect our first ever revolving sushi restaurant to be in Bloomington, IL of all places, but we really enjoyed the experience, so much so that we came back 3 times. It felt especially nice after a long day of work for Curtis to be able to just sit down and start grabbing plates rather than wait for orders to be taken and food to be prepared and delivered. It also allowed us to sample a few pieces of lots of different sushi rolls, rather than just order one or two full rolls. There was also the extra motivation of there being prizes given based on number of plates…
After two full weeks here, it was time to pack up for the next assignment. I told Curtis that I probably would have been perfectly happy if we had to stay here for the entire five weeks, but unfortunately that wasn’t a choice…instead, we’d be having to make the drive back to the East Coast, and to Wilmington, DE, where we had just been 3 weeks prior. Part of us was dreading it, but at the last minute, we made a change that would hopefully make our time there a little better. More on that, coming up next!
