Affordable lodgings and good chicken at Giant City Lodge in Makanda!
Recently on an expedition to check out the fall colors in Southern Illinois, I used this site to search out lodging for a quiet Sunday night’s lodging. I randomly called several of the B&B’s listed on ThisIsFun for rate information. 
After about 8 calls, my results consisted of 7 answering machines and one restaurant that doubles as reservations for cabins. I was ready to camp. I sure wasn’t ready to pay $125 for a B&B or cabin and didn’t want to stay in a sterile, corporate motel. Camping at Giant City seemed to be the reasonable, budget plan!
Then I remembered that the lodge at Giant City State Park has a diverse range of cabin accommodations if you are inclined to not sleep in a tent or “camp” in an RV among the rocks that define this wonderful state park. Double occupancy for the “Historic Cabins” starts as low as $69 from Sunday through Thursday and $10 more on Friday and Saturday. 
That gets you one of the smaller cabins near the lodge. Not only do these cabin sleep four with their double bed set up, but they have full bathrooms. There are other, larger cabins as well, but the focus here was on the “best” deal!
The smaller cabins dot slope on the left side of the lodge at Giant City Park. There are larger cabins, “Prairie” & “Bluff” with separate sleeping areas, scenic views, decks and fireplaces, that are also outstanding values.
Beyond the affordable cabins, the parking lot around lunch and dinner suggest there is treasure in the Giant City Lodge restaurant. Exploring there on Sunday afternoon around 3PM, I was amazed to find the parking lot at the base of the observation water tower full! It wasn’t folks coming for cabins or a view from the water tower, they were coming for “the chicken”!
The chicken is a distraction the minute you get near the lodge. The smell of fried chicken smacks your nose into attention. As you climb the narrow stairs to the observation deck on the water tower, you want to look towards the lodge.
view from Giant City State Park Makanda Illinois water tower looking towards Bald Knob
As you enjoy the splendid, 360 view from the deck, you think even more about “the chicken”! Locals appear to know this as the parking lot continued to fill with people of all ages heading to the lodge for “the chicken”! While registering from the cabin, all you could here from folks waiting for their reservation to be called, “have you tried the chicken?” or “I love eating here”. You can’t escape “the chicken”. After eating it, you understand why “the chicken” is famous!
The lodge serves up this chicken in a dangerous way! “All you can eat” appears to be the favorite whether it is the $7.99 lunch special** or the regular, $10.99, “all you can stand” dinner and weekend offer. Sure, the Giant City Lodge Restaurant serves more than fried chicken, but why swim against the tide?
On Thursday you can have “all you can eat” bbq chicken and Friday night, fish is the focus! The menu extends beyond “all you can eat” with a diverse selection of breakfast, lunch and dinner selections. Despite the offerings of steak, seafood, salads, and home-style dinners, most of what I saw was chicken! The chicken comes with homemade everything. Mashed potatoes with country milk gravy, creamy coleslaw, green beans, scratch dumplins, and buttered corn round out the home-style golden friend chicken. Don’t forget the homemade biscuits! Figure on about $15 during dinner with beverage and tax.
**The $7.99 “All You Can Eat” lunch special runs from 11 AM to 4PM Monday through Thursday!
A note on the historic cabins that would improve one’s experience, you might want to bring your own portable heater. A small one would be fine. The reason is that each cabin is apparently heated by heat pumps. Two downsides on these devices, they can be loud and they also blow cold for the first few minutes when they kick on. A small heater in the 
“Historic”, one room cabins would be quieter and probably enough in the evening. Just set the cabin heat to get the space warmed up and when time to hit the sack, kick on your small heater. I do not know if the larger cabins suffer the noisy heat pump issue since they do have dedicated bedrooms. Fortunately the heat pump is over- sized for the small cabins and never ran too long. The noise did not diminish the value of staying at Giant City State Park when exploring the Shawnee Wine Trail or Southern Illinois in general.
A bonus is that one of the closest wineries to the Giant City State Park is the wonderful, Blue Sky Winery! May I suggest you try the Gold Chardonnay if you happen to appreciate wineries. Get a side of bread and the unique Blue Sky dipping oil. That will wait for another blog!
Giant City State Park is about 15 minutes south of SIUE in Makanda, IL. Make reservations to guarantee your cabin as many know this park offers a nice value when exploring the Shawnee Forest, wine trail or Giant City State Park itself. Colors are peaking now!
Network!