Every mile is an adventure on Heartland Highways! Travel the highways and back roads of Illinois, Indiana and Missouri with co-hosts Lori Casey and Kate Pleasant! Each week the pair will take you on a new journey to destinations across the heartland and introduce you to the people that call it home along the way. Whether it’s a country restaurant, small-town artist, or unique personality, Heartland Highways will take you there.

The show is known for finding places that aren’t on the map. Casey and Pleasant scour the heartland looking to tell the stories of the real people that live, work and play there. In production for nearly a decade now, the show has become known for finding unique and interesting people and places right in their own backyard. Heartland Highways is a production of WEIU TV, a PBS station on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois, a town with a population of roughly 22,000.

Co-hosts Casey and Pleasant are no strangers to small towns, though – they both grew up in one! Casey is originally from Redwood Falls, Minnesota, a town of about 5,000, and before moving to Charleston, Pleasant called Robinson, Illinois, population 7,500, home. The pair says that’s where their passion for small towns and the people in them came from.

From an early age Pleasant always wanted to tell stories. Whether it was writing for her high school newspaper or producing a newscast during her journalism training at Eastern Illinois University, finding out what makes people tick was always her passion. Casey started out at a public television station in Minnesota where she had a similar travel magazine show. When she came to WEIU in the early 2000s she didn’t hesitate to start Heartland Highways and begin telling the important stories of the people and places of Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.

Production of the show begins in the spring as new stories are filmed.  About 30 new segments are filmed through the fall.  Editing takes place throughout the fall and winter with production wrapped up in March, just in time to start the process all over again. Casey and Pleasant not only host the show, but shoot, edit and write all of the stories. People often ask “will you ever run out of story ideas?”  The answer is no, because viewers are great about sending us new material all the time, plus Heartland Highways has a file of ideas that have been collected over the years.

Heartland Highways came to RFDTV in 2005. Since that time, viewers from all over the country have contacted the show with comments and story ideas. RFDTV and Heartland Highways is a great match since both share the same commitment to quality programming that celebrates rural America and the people to live there.  Heartland Highways is proud to be a part of the programming lineup on RFDTV.

We believe every mile is an adventure and we hope to see you out there on the Heartland Highways.

Thanks for watching.

Contact
WEIU TV/Heartland Highways
600 Lincoln Avenue
Charleston, IL 61920
1-877-727-9348
heartlandhighways@weiu.net
www.weiu.net