Illinois Region Guide

Illinois is two destinations that share a state: Chicago, one of the world's great cities for architecture, music and food, and the Illinois of rivers and prairie -- Lincoln's Springfield, the thousand-year-old city at Cahokia, Starved Rock's canyons, the Shawnee forest. The friction is that they demand opposite trips. Chicago is the one Midwestern city where a car is a liability, with the L running all night on two lines; everything downstate is unreachable without one, and distances run longer than the flatness suggests. Northern winters are cold and snowy, spring is tornado season, and the lakefront festivals pack July and August. The smart way is to treat them as two visits: Chicago car-free in May, June, September or October, when the weather is best and the lakefront quieter, and downstate as a separate drive -- skipping Starved Rock on autumn weekends, when it is at its busiest.

If you travel slowly

Give Chicago four days -- the Loop and the river, the Museum Campus, Millennium Park, a North Side neighbourhood and a game at Wrigley -- then drive Route 66 south: Joliet, Pontiac, Springfield's Lincoln sites for a full day, and on to Cahokia across the river from St. Louis. Or go north-west to Galena and the Mississippi River bluffs, or south to Carbondale, the Shawnee forest and the Garden of the Gods.

If you want to see the essentials

The view from the Skydeck; the Art Institute; the Field Museum's T. rex; Cloud Gate in Millennium Park; the architecture cruise; the Lincoln Home and Tomb in Springfield; Monks Mound at Cahokia; Starved Rock's canyons in spring, when the waterfalls run.

If you seek local character

A Chicago hot dog dragged through the garden, an Italian beef dipped, a deep-dish pizza, a horseshoe in Springfield; a blues club on a weeknight and the free Blues Festival in June; Maxwell Street's descendants; the State Fair in Springfield in August; a Cubs or Sox afternoon; Oak Park's Frank Lloyd Wright houses on foot.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

Midewin's bison on the first national tallgrass prairie; the Cache River's cypress swamps at the state's southern tip; Volo Bog, the only quaking bog in Illinois; Nauvoo, the restored Mormon town on the river; the Pullman company town; the free ferry at Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio River; and Kaskaskia, the first capital, now marooned on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River.

Illinois calls itself the Prairie State and honours Lincoln on its plates, and both are true, but its character is Chicago's: a city that grew faster than any in the world in the nineteenth century, burned in 1871, rebuilt in steel and invented the skyscraper, hosted the 1893 world's fair that gave America the Ferris wheel and the Chicago hot dog, reversed its river, and became, through the Great Migration, the northern capital of Black America and the birthplace of the electric blues, of gospel and of house music. The rest of the state is the Midwestern heartland the city sells food to and sends its weekends to -- German, Swedish and Hungarian farm country turned by the John Deere plough, coal and river towns in the south that look to Kentucky, a university town at Champaign–Urbana, and Springfield, where the capital has been since Lincoln's legislative caucus moved it in 1837.

The people are the country's mix in one state: German is the largest ancestry at 15.8 per cent, Irish 10.5, Polish 6.1 -- the largest Polish-American population of any state -- and Italian 5.5; Hispanics are 19.4 per cent, three-quarters of them Mexican-American, the largest share in the Midwest; Black Illinoisans 15.3 per cent, mostly in Chicago and its south suburbs; Asians 7.1 per cent, Indian first. A quarter of households speak another language, Spanish above all and Polish notably. Catholics are nearly a quarter of the population -- the only American-born pope was born in Chicago -- Protestants 36 per cent, Muslims 3.7 per cent, the largest share of any state, and the Chicago area's Jewish community numbers over 300,000.

The high culture is the Art Institute, named the world's best museum in one survey, the Chicago Symphony, the Lyric, the theatre scene and the architecture; the popular culture is the Cubs' 108-year wait, Michael Jordan's six titles, the Bears, the tailgate, the summer festivals in the downtown lakefront park, and a politics famous for its machines and its convicted governors.

Illinois's wild places are small and hard-won. Less than a fraction of the tallgrass prairie that covered the state survives, which is why Midewin, on an old army ammunition plant, has been restoring 19,000 acres since 1996 and grazing bison on it since 2015; Starved Rock's 2,630 acres take over two million visitors a year, the most of any state park, so its canyons need visitors on the trails and off the fragile sandstone edges; the Cache River and Emiquon wetlands are protected under the Ramsar convention because so little of the river floodplain is left; and Cahokia's mounds are earth, worn by feet, so the paths are the point. Stay on trails, keep to the boardwalks in the bogs and swamps, leave the wildflowers, and do not climb the mounds where signs forbid it.

In Chicago the responsibility is civic: the lakefront is public by law and kept clean by the people who use it; the L is the greenest way to see the city and runs all night on two lines; the neighbourhoods beyond the Loop reward visitors who spend in them; and the free festivals, museums' free days and parks exist because the city funds them, so treat them as a gift rather than a right.

Spend where it protects: the state parks and forests, the museums and the historic sites that survive on admissions and donations -- Cahokia asks $7 -- the small-town Route 66 businesses, the family pizzerias and beef stands, and the wineries of the Shawnee Hills.

January–February -- cold and often snowy in the north, milder in the south; the museums, the blues clubs and the Loop at their emptiest; bald eagles on the Mississippi River; Starved Rock's frozen waterfalls.

March–April -- the thaw, the waterfalls at Starved Rock running, spring wildflowers in the Shawnee Hills; the start of the tornado season, which peaks in spring; baseball opens at Wrigley.

May–June -- the best weeks in Chicago: the lakefront opens, the Blues Festival in early June is free in Millennium Park, the prairies bloom at Midewin.

July–August -- hot and humid, Springfield averaging 87 °F; Taste of Chicago and Lollapalooza in the downtown lakefront park, the Illinois State Fair's eleven days in Springfield in mid-August, the free Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend.

September–October -- the clearest weather, the Chicago Marathon in October, Open House Chicago, the harvest and the wine trails, autumn colour in the Shawnee forest and at Galena.

November–December -- the first snow, the Christmas tree in Millennium Park, the Magnificent Mile lit; the south still mild.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs region average

Higher — downtown Chicago, especially in summer, Lollapalooza and Marathon weekends and the December holidays; Galena; Starved Rock's lodge on autumn weekends

Average — Springfield, Champaign–Urbana, Peoria, Rockford, the Quad Cities, Oak Park and the suburbs

Lower — downstate towns, the Shawnee Hills, the river towns, and Chicago itself from January to March

The CTA and Metra fares, the Skydeck prices, the Cahokia donation, the Lincoln Home parking fee and the free admissions are the operators' own; hotel, meal, fuel, rental, toll and Art Institute prices are not stated because no readable authority page prints them, and the relative bands are editorial judgment.