Garbage, Recycling and Yard Waste Pickup in the Southwest Suburbs (and How Much Garbage Pickup Costs)
Every town out here picks up your garbage once a week. Every one of them takes your recycling. Almost all of them run a yard waste season that starts in spring and ends when your leaves are done. Here's the part that changes the day you move. In Manteno, you pay nothing for it. The village covers yo
Date Night Ideas in the Southwest Suburbs (and the Most Romantic Restaurants to Start the Night)
You may think a typical date night is dinner, some form of entertainment, and a drink. Out here, the entertainment has already closed. So you either reorder the night or you take the middle part outside. Every museum and every gallery in every walkable downtown in the southwest suburbs closes before
What Happened to All the Southwest Suburb Breweries? (and Which Ones Are Still Open)
You looked it up, it said open, you drove there, and the lights were off. If that has happened to you in the last couple of years, it was not your fault and you were not being careless. The listing said open because almost nothing on the internet ever gets around to saying otherwise. A brewery close
Best Breweries in the Southwest Suburbs (and the Ones That Didn't Make It)
Search for breweries near here and you will get a list of Chicago breweries. Half Acre, Goose Island, Revolution. All good, all thirty-five minutes and a toll away, and none of them the answer to what you asked. So I went through all nineteen towns out here myself. What I found was not what I expect
Late Night Coffee Near Me: What's Actually Open in the Southwest Suburbs
It is 10:40 at night. You are heading in for a shift, or you just got off one, or the baby finally went down and you want twenty minutes that belong to you. So you type "late night coffee near me" into your phone and you get a map with three Dunkins on it, two of which closed two hours ago. I went l
The Best Pizza in the Southwest Suburbs (and Why Almost All of It Is Tavern Style)
Ask somebody out here where to get pizza and you will get a fast answer, a specific one, and no hesitation at all. Ask two people and you will get an argument. What you will almost never get is a debate about style, and that surprises people who move here from somewhere else. They arrive expecting C
Haunted Houses in the Southwest Suburbs (From Family-Friendly to Genuinely Terrifying)
Fall out here comes with a real range of Halloween options, and they are not all the same speed. Some are gentle pumpkin farms built for a two-year-old's first hayride, and some are 150-actor nightmares you will feel in your chest for a week. I am honestly both kinds of person: I am the dad taking t
The Best Paved Bike Trails in the Southwest Suburbs (and Which One to Ride First)
I have ridden Midewin twice over the years and none since I moved out here, but mostly because somebody told me it was flat and I believed them. They were right. What I did not know until I started actually looking is how much paved trail is sitting within twenty minutes of my house, and how much of
A Dog Lover's Guide to the Southwest Suburbs
I am a dog owner, I am still fairly new to the area, and when I went looking for the good dog-friendly spots out here, I could not find a straight answer. Every "dog-friendly patio near Chicago" list is about the city, not the southwest suburbs. So I started building my own, partly for you and partl