Have you ever been to Chicago and took the L?

[VIDEO] I've been an L rider all my life. Spent many a Saturday in my youth riding to downtown with my mother when she used to work at a bank downtown. Now I spend a lot of time on the CTA getting to school or work or just getting out of the house for a few hours.

Today I have a tourist piece for you. Strangely enough I'm starting with the yellow line aka Skokie Swift. Skokie is an adjacent suburb of Chicago and the CTA does have L service which travels to nearby suburbs such as Skokie, Evanston, Cicero, Oak Park & Forest Park.

Either way I realised that I've traveled on almost everyline of the CTA L system. Only recently - that is within the last 10 or so years my travels have taken me to all of the CTA's colored lines.

When I attended community college in downtown Chicago I traveled the blue line to O'Hare, Forest Park and 54/Cermak. Now the 54/Cermak branch is part of the pink line as a result of service changes. I also took the train from Ashland/63 and Cottage Grove to get downtown via the green line. Also I traveled the red line from 95th all the way to Howard and changed to the purple from Howard to get to Linden. Finally I took the orange from downtown to Midway and back.

Since then I've taken the pink line with some video that needs to be digitized in the future. Also for the first time I took the brown line all the way to Kimball and took the green line to it's west side terminal at Harlem Avenue. Since I've started working I've taken the yellow line on two occasions mainly to get up to Old Orchard mall and that means I'd have to take the bus from the Skokie stop.

I forgot to note the quirk of the purple line. While the purple is a local service within Evanston when it stops at Howard it becomes an express during rush hour with no stops until Belmont. When I worked briefly in Evanston to make up some time I took the express train to get to work there.

Needless to say there have been many interesting adventures on CTA as you can sometimes tell if you follow me on twitter. If only I had such a tool during the pre-twitter/social media days.

There's more videos of other CTA routes via their YouTube page.

State Journal-Register: Visit impresses British relative of Lincoln

Springfield, Illinois is the state capital and unfortunately it takes a back seat to it's much larger sister city of Chicago. As far as state government goes all the action is in Springfield especially during a session of the Illinois General Assembly. This is true in spite of the fact that most of this state's constitutional officers well all but one of six in fact resides in the Chicago area.

Springfield is known for it's association with America's 16th President who just so happens to be Abraham Lincoln who is known for leading this nation through a Civil War and during the course of that war freed the slaves. It's interesting that in this article we see that genealogists found President Lincoln's closest living British relative and they brought him to his cousin's adopted hometown.

It was such an enjoyable visit for him that he wants to tell others to visit Springfield. It just let's everyone know that Lincoln buffs are everywhere and they're willing to visit the sites where Lincoln lived or worked. And at that the sites such as Lincoln's Presidential Library that shows his place in history.

Welcome to Illinois Mr. & Mrs. Gilchrist hopefully the people you meet wherever you go in this state will show you nothing but great hospitality. And as a person who is an Illinoisian, Springfield is probably the one place that I need to visit in the future. All I've done in the past is pass through and that needs to change!