Sunny but cold start to the day. When does the shorts weather start?
We considered stopping at the small hamlet of Funk’s Grove. Its main claim to fame is that the local cemetery is chock full of tombstones with the name Funk. Oh, and it is halfway between the neighbouring towns of Shirley and MacLean.
Our first stop was in Atlanta, Illinois – a small farming town. We liked the one-stop local government:
We found another muffler-man. This one was flogging a hot-dog outlet. It had a pretty library and a classic car on the main street. Also, the town fathers got cutesy with the water tower.
We then headed for Springfield, home town of Abe Lincoln. Along the way, just past the road to the Viper Mine, we found a miles-long thing, still under construction, snaking its way across the countryside parallel to the Highway. We stopped to take a closer look. It seems to be a very long conveyor belt to take coal from the mine to the power plant some miles away.
We then visited Lincoln’s Tomb, and his Springfield home, where he practiced law and politics, and raised famously undisciplined kids.
(A tacky tomb of Tanner, a state governor, not far from Lincoln's Tomb.)
We spent a couple of fascinating hours at his presidential museum, where I would loved to have taken lots of photos but was allowed to only in one room - hence the wax figure family grouping, and a replica of his childhood log cabin. The displays were very worthwhile, I learned a lot about the politics leading up to the civil war
The day clouded over and got rainy. On the way out of town, we stopped at a Frank Lloyd Wright home – too late in the day to visit, but we took a picture.
We then drove through the gloaming to Litchfield. At the Magnuson Grand Hotel (surprising nice but affordable, in the middle of nowhere) we checked in. On my way to my room, I almost stepped on a baby snake barely visible against the hall carpet. A maintenance man came and removed it. Weird, eh?
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