Look up the Grand Illinois Trail. Its basically a route that uses a bunch of individual trails and sone rural roads to form a 575mile route encircling northern Illinois.
You could incorporate that into the ride to Minneapolis.
It takes younwest to Rock Island via the I&M canal trail which vonnects to the Hennepin canal trail. Then you go north along the Mississippi. Up near Galena, insread of heading east, you could route yourself up to Minneapolis. Then when heading home, you could get near Galena and go east which would put you back on the Grand Illinois Trail. That leads you to the NW burbs and trsils tske you to Chicago, or you could ride on to the North Shore and take a bunch of those trails down into the city.
2 birds 1 stone. You would have ridden to minneapolis and ridden the Grand Illinois Trail.