#4: [26-Feb-17]

#3: [05-Jun-04]

#2: [10-Mar-01]

#1: [30-Sep-00]

05-Oct-2025 -- Beginning a new chapter of my career in Central Illinois, I have been itching to start checking off the proverbial boxes of confluences in the Prairie State. Having clinched 8 of the 17 confluences within my former home state of Oklahoma (plus 4 on its border), I have become quite acquainted with the landscape of the Sooner State. While some may think of Oklahoma as just another flyover state, my journeys across its territory through confluencing and other activities (some more esoteric than others) have revealed that Oklahoma’s terrain is extremely wildly varying. That being said, when researching my new home of Illinois through a confluencing lens (of course), I have found that it appears the case may not be the same here. Nearly every confluence appears to be located in mind-numbingly flat agricultural fields. After all, according to many metrics, Illinois is the second flattest state after Florida, while Oklahoma is 16th (this study curiously omits Alaska and Hawaii, but I can’t imagine they sway the flatness scale too much!). That being said, I still cannot wait to explore all the Land of Lincoln has to offer, a confluence is a confluence all the same, and, hey, maybe I’ll discover that Illinois, too, is way more than meets the eye, and what better way than confluencing to figure that out!

The rationale behind my choosing of 40°N, 88°W to be my first point in Illinois can essentially be summarized as “It’s somewhat convenient, why not?”. The point lies, of course, in a flat farm field amidst a maze of gridlike section roads–pretty standard fare for the Lower Midwest. This particular field lies about 3 mi (5 km) southwest of Homer, a small farming town near the eastern edge of Champaign County, home of the Champaign/Urbana metro area (a.k.a C-U). C-U itself is anchored by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the fifth largest university in the US in terms of student population (housing a whopping 60,848 students as of this writing). With its proximity to one of the larger cities in this region, the point naturally lies relatively close to the Interstate network–just 8 mi (13 km) south of Interstate 74. For this reason, I actually made a Hail Mary attempt at the point back on September 1 while passing through, though I didn’t even leave the road network that day, as the field was (unsurprisingly) planted with feed corn twice my height–undeterred, I vowed to come back later in the fall after harvest. As luck would have it, on this first Sunday of October, I had plans at Homer Lake Forest Preserve, a regional park about 4 mi (7 km) to the point’s northeast.

Needing to fuel up in the morning, I had stopped at Maple & Yolk, which was what I discovered to be a phenomenal (and very reasonably priced) local breakfast joint just off I-74 in Urbana. Once this hearty breakfast was complete, I headed out to Homer Lake. The park is decent–several trails and facilities surround a small dammed lake, and it’s completely free! For a few hours of grilling and recreation, the park is completely adequate–a nice change from the nearly featureless surroundings of this general region. Once our day at the lake was through, I embarked on the short jaunt southwest (including through Homer) toward the confluence. After an easy few minutes on grid roads, I was in its vicinity. 40°N 88°W lies roughly equidistant between Champaign County Roads 800 North and 2500 East, and I immediately chose to park on CR-800N as I got to the point–it was a very secluded gravel country lane, while its intersecting companion CR-2500E was a paved, fairly heavily traveled arterial connecting several of the local farming communities. Due south of the point on the south side of CR-800N, there was a grassy indentation into a yet-unharvested cornfield–it appeared to be a tractor turnaround, but I saw it as a great (and hidden) place to park for my confluence trek.

From this point, I walked essentially straight north across two recently harvested cornfields. I did this a little wearily–there was a fair amount of road traffic and clearly occupied houses on CR-2500E that I was in sight of, but I was far enough away that they would have had to really look to see me. Walking up to the point took about 5-10 minutes, and once I was there I spent a fair bit of time trying to get a perfect zeros reading on my GPS app–the closest I ended up getting was one millionth of a degree of latitude away on the exact line of longitude. This struggle was more a testament of the poor quality of my mobile GPS app than the accessibility to satellites–this point being amid a flat, treeless landmass in perfect weather gives me no doubt that all zeroes wouldn’t have been a struggle with an even half-decent true GPS. Nonetheless, the time being about 4:45PM, I was standing on my 21st confluence and my first of hopefully a great many Illinois confluences! This was my second time standing on the 40th parallel (the first being two degrees east of here in Indiana about two months ago), and my first time standing on the 88th meridian. I took a few minutes to take in the point under the late-afternoon October sunlight that was already starting to dim–one can really tell you’re along the eastern edge of the time zone this time of year. While the Homer grain elevator was visible to the northeast, the remaining terrain and scenery were definitely on the boring end for an elevation fan like myself, but there was something oddly beautiful about the goldening sunlight and lengthening shadows quietly reflecting off of the light brown vegetation ready for harvest. It felt very…homey in a way, reinforcing perhaps the biggest reason why I love confluencing–there are very few activities that truly get you a feel of the local landscape and way of life like how these points do.

The weather today was quite unusual for mid-fall at this latitude–heck, most of the last couple months have had unusual weather in Central Illinois. The fall so far had basically been ”flipped”: about three weeks of late August and early September were almost universally cooler than normal (feeling much more like late September and early October), while mid-September through this visit was almost universally warmer than normal (feeling closer to late August and early September). One thing, however, was consistent since early August: drought. Today was no exception to either trend–temperatures hovered in the mid-80s °F (~29°C) with low humidity under a cloudless sky, the umpteenth day in a row with nearly identical conditions. Also present was a stiff breeze from the south, and gusts of up to 35 mph prompted the National Weather Service to issue an advisory for ripe brushfire weather in this region, though luckily I saw nothing to verify these conditions on this day. Interestingly, the abnormally warm, dry, windy weather reminded me of my confluence visit one year and one day prior near Taloga, Oklahoma (though admittedly a few degrees cooler).

After a few minutes at the point, I headed back to my car, noting that not a single other vehicle had passed by mine on CR-800N in the 25 minutes I was gone. Satisfied with my short tour of east central Illinois, I headed home, making my best effort to get back before the start of what proved to be a thrilling Sunday Night Football showdown between the Patriots and the Bills, a great end to a great day.