Students sit and talk on Post lawn. (Robert Nguyen/TKS)
With existing COVID-19 guidelines for keeping our campus community safe, it’s important to adjust the way we socialize. While the weather is still nice, seeing your friends outside is a great way to stay socially distanced while also feeding your need for socialization. Below are some areas of campus that make for great picnic spots. This short list is by no means exhaustive; you’re more than welcome to explore the outdoors for more places to catch up or talk about the weather!
Standish Park
Standish Park Arboretum, located across Alumni Hall and beside Williston Residence Hall, is home to a whopping 137 trees of 67 different species. This is an ideal setting not only for a shaded hang, but also for testing your plant identification skills. There’s a tree directory at the entrance that names all the types of trees inside. A sidewalk pathway brings you to the centerpiece of the park, a circular wooden canopy where you and your friends can sit down and romanticize your small town life and have a new view of Galesburg in every direction you look. If the canopy or a blanket isn’t your forte, there’s tables located at various points in the park where you can sit down and enjoy nature.
Old Main / Seymour Lawns
The average Illinoisan would likely agree that when the sun is out, you need to juice it for all it’s worth. That is, soak it in every minute you can while it’s still here and save the shade for later. If the campus lawns were earthly bodies of water, the lawns beside Old Main and Seymour would be the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Not only is there a ton of open space, for plenty of fish — erm, people — to sit around, there’s also not much around to come between you and the warmth of that big beautiful day star in the sky. There’s sure to be at least one familiar face surrounding you, whether they are walking to class or also basking in the sun.
Basketball / Tennis Court
Do you like the idea of sitting down for a picnic, but know that in reality you will become a bit restless within five minutes from too little movement? Do you, like Lorde, want to go down to the tennis courts and talk it up like “yeah, yeah?” Do you ever have the urge to drop everything and run in a giant circle as though you were desperately corralling cattle? You’ll probably want to head to the South end of campus’s Bermuda triangle, except each of the three points is the basketball, tennis, and track sites. If you and your friends get bored of sitting down six feet apart with a piece of cloth on your face, you can instead run around more than six feet apart with a piece of cloth of your face and hold some sort of athletic utensil. A unique benefit of this location is if it’s a colder day, you can warm yourself up with no problem as you can start getting that blood pumping at any minute.
Lake Storey
If you have a means of transportation besides your own two feet in Galesburg, check out Lake Storey! All you have to do is drive North down Henderson street and take a left turn. A change of scenery from the dry land of campus, Lake Storey offers—you guessed it—a lake! With a concrete trail, plenty of grass and some small docks sitting over the water, you can close your eyes, listen to the wind whistle on the lake, and pretend you’re on the Amalfi Coast and not procrastinating all your assignments. If that reasoning still doesn’t appeal to you, you should at least try to go for the sake of crossing it off your Knox bucket list. If you don’t have a way to get there, try to find a friend who has a car and also would like to dip their toes in a green-hued lake.
