We’ve just had three warm days in a row, sunny and springlike. That can’t last, of course. Beginning tomorrow, days too cool to eat outside are ahead. We had our dinner on the deck this evening.

Earlier in the afternoon we went to the Raceway Woods Forest Preserve, which is in Carpentersville, Illinois. It sports a structure unique in all metro Chicago forest preserves, I’m certain.
It’s the Meadowdale Silo, and a nearby sign told me that it’s been in place since the 1930s or earlier. After the Meadowdale International Raceway was developed in 1958, the silo acquired a paint job advertising the race course.

If Wiki is right, the race track never established itself as a moneymaking venture, finally petering out in 1969. For whatever reason, nothing else was ever developed there, and second-growth trees returned to the site. These days Raceway Woods is part of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County.The walking trails follow the original path of the raceway. We started at You Are Here (near the silo) and walked around the northernmost loop: up the Uphill Climb, and it was up a fair-sized hill, down Long Straight, around Little Monza and along Greg’s Corkscrew. About a mile.

The Uphill Climb.
I wondered how wide the original raceway was. The current path is fine for walkers and bicyclists and the single skateboarder we saw, but it doesn’t look wide enough to be a raceway. I’d think that anyway, but I don’t know much about raceways, European style or otherwise.

The Long Straight, which passes over a creek bound for the Fox River, not too far to the east.
Nice views from the bridge.
From the bridge I noticed concatenate unpaved trails winding their way through the woods. Auto racing hasn’t been a thing at Meadowdale for more than 50 years, but mountain biking at the forest preserve is alive and well.