There’s so much to love about Urbana in autumn. Carle Park. A walk in Meadowbrook. A day fishing off the dock at Crystal Lake. The sounds of the Illini Marching band off in the distance. Students wandering about, all wide-eyed and filled with vim. It has an idyllic downtown, with a bevy of choices when it comes to dining out or grabbing a beer or seeing live music.
The crown jewel for events located in the city’s center is the annual Urbana Sweetcorn Festival, a celebration of the harvest of perhaps this area’s finest export worldwide. If you remember, the most delicious and ubiquitous version of this vegetable was developed and genetically modified here to bring forth “Illini Xtra Sweetcorn.”
Tonight, and all day tomorrow, get your buttery, salty ears of corn on the streets of Downtown Urbana for a buck an ear, and take in a bunch of great programming for kids and adults alike. Triptych Brewery will be set up at Sipyard for a tap takeover, where you can purchase beer and walk out into the street to any of the live music stages.
CU Folk and Roots Festival curates a stage every year that is filled with top notch Americana and folk artists. The One Community Together stage is another fantastic way to see all of the wonderful talent this area has to offer. At 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, you can listen to all three local high school’s marching bands perform, apart and together, which is genuinely inspiring and worth every moment of your time.
Here is the full schedule:
Another reason to come out this year, it seems like the wizards at the UBA have convinced Uncle Zorba’s Greek Food to come out again, after they were sadly absent in 2017. It will take everything in my power to not eat two plates of food, since Champaign-Urbana has no Greek restaurant to enjoy. Three cheers to the team at UBA for this gift!
This is a great event, and something that helps shine a light on some of the nicer and more community driven aspects of living in a city like this one.
As a townie from Urbana, I never miss it. And now that I have children, they don’t either.
Corn photo: Jessica Hammie
Plaque photo: Wikimedia