Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Great Day with Friends -- Lincoln Museum (O'Fallon, IL)

The weather was forecast to be good so we decided to get up early and head out to Springfield to see the Abe Lincoln Home, and Library & Museum.  It's about a two hour drive to Springfield with little traffic, and got to the Lincoln Home Visitors Center for the first stop. I called our RV-Dreams friends Char and Denny and they drove over from Bloomington, IL to join us. The Abe Lincoln Home is a National Historical Site, so Jim - being a disabled veteran - applied for a Federal Parks Lifetime Access Pass.  It will be nice now to get into any National Park or Historical Site for half price.

We took many pictures and I'll put most of them in a folder and have them later.  Here's a few...

Here I'm checking things out in a sidewalk telescope.


Lincoln's house.  He lived here for 17 years before being elected President and leaving for Washington.



Some of the rooms in the house.


They tried to hide the chamber pot under the bed.  I'm glad we don't have those now days.


I'm learning to do a web album in Picasa, and once I do I'll post the rest of the photos, along with photos of all the RV Parks and the Sightseeing trips we've done so far.  But until then, here's a few more from today.

Our son and a couple other people mentioned D'Arcy's Pint, an Irish pub in Springfield.  It's famous for a dish call a Horseshoe. It's a huge hamburger patty with fries and cheese on top of it.


Then there's the Shepherd's Pie. It's huge.  If you're smart you'd take over half of it home.


From lunch we went to the Lincoln Library and Museum.  The library is closed to the public and only available for researchers.  The museum is huge, with many very interesting exhibits.  You can follow Lincoln's entire life, from his childhood growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, to his Springfield and White House years.  Here's Char and Denny posing with the Lincoln family.  Can you spot them?

We weren't allowed to take pictures in the museum except in the lobby area.

We got home in time to meet for dinner with friends of Jim's from his military days. We had a great time catching up with both families' lives over the past few years.  Thank you so much Bob and Paula for dinner and a great time.


It's been a very long day, but it was wonderful.  One of Jim's goals on the road is to visit all of the Presidential libraries and museums.  There are 13 of them and he's been to two so far, Truman and Lincoln.  There's so many more to go.  We'll get there; we're free to go and do as we want.

3 comments:

A couple of newer paintings 2019 said...

Being raised on a farm with no indoor plumbing, I remember chamber pots well. Also glad we don't have to use them anymore!

KarenInTheWoods said...

Thanks for the tour!

In the chamber pot photo, the edge of the bed covering is a handwoven coverlet in the overshot method, and if I saw a bit more of it, I could identify the pattern and era in which it had been woven. Overshot coverlets were prevalent in Kentucky, Virginia and many of the colonial states. As families migrated west, their cherished coverlets came along with them, and it's fun to see where they came from, usually where the previous generations had been from.

Chuck and Anneke's RV travels said...

Looks like a good place to visit. We are heading there in June for a tour of Springfield.

Have fun.

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