A lot of our best memories come from IL, but I never lived there, my folks originally come from IL, however they moved away when our mom was still pregnant with me; Some years later they took myself and others back to visit; The first visit was boring, the hour visit a little better, & by the time I was 14 I was eager to get back into the farmland & visit our cousins.
The expression “it’s a nice locale to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there” comes to mind.
My cousins y acquired to escape the confines of farming country, but I was pleased to spend a few weeks in IL & smoke as much cannabis as I could get our hands on. There was a lot of it, too, because our IL cousins had nothing better to do than get high, so they did it a lot! I was a little jealous at first, because there was so much wide-open farmland in this area of rural IL that our cousins could grow as many cannabis plants as they wanted. In fact they both spent a lot of time cultivating cannabis, because they had so little else to do. They dreamed of moving out of the IL backwoods & to a major city. This is why they started selling cannabis, because it was the only way they could save up enough money to transfer to a better area of IL. It was easier for me, because I knew come the end of our vacation I would leave IL behind & head back to our normal life.