RIDING THE SCOOTS. While I was away, the Chicago Tribune explored the end of the Milwaukee Road's Fox Lake line.

Fox Lake is a gift of the glaciers that scoured this section of northeastern Illinois. The town is the lake and the lake is the town. It seems every other driveway has a boat on a trailer in the driveway. The gentle hills and the water lend a feel of northern Wisconsin right here in Illinois, including a seeming abundance of taverns and, incredibly, Packer fans."

The glaciers were no respecters of something as mundane as 42 degrees 30 minutes North latitude (the approximate location of the Cheddar Curtain,) which gives northeastern Illinois a little bit of the Lake District.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Chris Walker.

This week, Aurora, where artistic dinosaurs roam.

There are overachieving young wizards here at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and at least two famed, though fictional, underachievers in Wayne and Garth of "Wayne's World." Aurora's Paramount Arts Centre is listed in the National Register of Historic places, while its Hi-Lite 30 drive-in movie theater from the '50s is likely doomed.

Aurora contains more than 130 authenticated Sears homes, making it one of the largest concentrations nationally. Sears homes, made between 1908 and 1940, were designed to be shipped broken down and assembled on site, with shipments timed to arrive in coordination with construction scheduling. As a railway town, Aurora was a natural site for these buildings.

"Little boxes on a hillside and they all look just the same" antedated those Fifties gripes about soul-less suburbia. The vanishing drive-in theater is a canonical illustration of opportunity costs at work. A drive-in theater might provide local kids with remunerative work and the owners with a good living on three or four months of receipts, but real estate hustlers see all sorts of potential for putting up 130 or 200 descendants of those Sears houses on the infield.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Michael Tercha.

Aurora is the outer terminus of the Burlington line, route of the Naperville Zephyrs. The service sets the world standard for moving commuters in large numbers and relative comfort. Other suburban services might deliver more than 2000 passengers per train on four-minute intervals during the morning commute, and return similar numbers on similar headways in the evening, but not as expeditiously and generally not with the expectation of a seat, which is almost always available somewhere on the train.