Champaign
Campground
D & W Lake Camping and RV Park
Nice family campground in a quiet area with a small pond. The only downfall is that they were very strict about letting dogs off-leash to play fetch in the field. They did, however, have a dog park.
Things to see
Lake Of The Woods Forest Preserve
Beautiful park with a koi pond, flower gardens, and running/walking trails. We spent a lot of time here just enjoying the outdoors.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
As a point of interest, UIUC hosts the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). This is a facility Mark is quite familiar with. When he worked for Cray Inc., a system called "Blue Waters" was installed here. At the time, it was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Aside from being the architect of the system control software that eventually made its way onto this system, he was part of the team that demonstrated a sustained 1 TB/s filesystem bandwidth.
To make a long story short ...
The Loss of Ziggy Stardust
After a wonderful 16 year life, our super cool cat, Ziggy, went to kitty heaven. Ziggy was given to Mark by his daughter Breanna in 2007. She had found him as a stray on the streets of Prescott, WI, where they had been living. She wanted his name to be "Stardust" but Mark had the idea of using David Bowie's stage persona instead. Ziggy Stardust.
