Lincoln Country

We started in St Louis with a pleasant outside breakfast. Suprisingly popular at 9:30am on a Friday morning, and even though we were in the university area it was not students, though a fair few retired looking folk. I liked St Louis and would go back for a proper visit one day,




We then went to Springfield Illinois (our second Springfield so far and still no Simpsons). This is where Lincoln lived for the twenty five years before he became President. We saw his home, and they kept the street as it was in his time.


Afterwards we went to the Lincoln Presidential Library, where there was a very interactive museum of his life which had mock ups of his boyhood home ("he was born in a log cabin, that he built himself"), his White House and the theatre where he was assassinated (which we will visit when in Washington DC). There was also a great Audio-Visual in the old three-screen-style but which also had smoke machines and vibrating seats. Through the exhibition there was also a video of the Civil War in 4 minutes where every second represented a week while a map showed the territory won or lost by the Union and the Confederacy as the four year war progressed. It also highlighted where the major battles were. I realised my knowledge of this conflict was poor so we bought an audio version of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary to listen to in the car.



We then visitited Lincoln, Illinois, the first town to be named after the President. Abraham Lincoln himself christened it with watermelon juice shortly before he became President and said "nothing good came of anything that was named after me".


We arrived in Chicago and are staying in the centre of things! It is like being on the set of ER.