Sightseeing in Springfield

Of course I want to tell you about our vacation! And in case you want to visit any of the places we went to, I want you to be well informed! So I'm going to start with our first stop of the trip...which was Springfield, Illinois. I'm actually going to take a couple of days to tell you about Springfield, but don't worry. I won't do that for every stop. :)

If you missed the podcast yesterday, let me catch you up by telling you the main goal of this trip was to get out to Kansas to meet my new great-niece. That is such a long trip, though, so we decided to do things a big differently this time and break up the drive into small chunks. We left home early in the morning and totally forgot that we would be gaining an hour when we crossed the Illinois line, so we had many hours to spend in Springfield!

It's actually only about a three and a half hour drive from home, so this was a very very pleasant driving day. We arrived in town in late morning, local time, but lunchtime in our bellies. I'd found a restaurant in my online searches that promised good food and great pie, so I suggested it to Ryan. He is such a lover of pie.

I was grateful for honest reviews, because I'd read multiple times that this place was nothing to look at from the outside, but the food was worth stopping for. I was thankful for that honesty, because we truly never would have stopped based on the building itself. It was really rough. But the reviews didn't lie, because the food was worth it. Because of that, we can recommend the Café Coco!

Ryan picked a table literally beside the pie case. LOL!!!

One of Ryan's co-workers is originally from this area and told him about horseshoe sandwiches, which feature the fries built right into the sandwich, rather than being served separately. He really wanted to try it, but he feared it would be a bit too much food. Fortunately the ponyshoe sandwich (smaller version of the same) was an option, so he went with that. He also opted to get a tenderloin for the meat, rather than a burger. He's still talking about this sandwich.

I tried to get a teriyaki chicken salad (trying so hard to be good on the road) but it turned out they were out of chicken. (Before 11:00 in the morning!!) So they offered me a BLT salad instead. I thought it sounded really great, so I agreed. I did not know this one came already heavily dressed. I won't lie: it was delicious. But clearly it was not healthy.

Of course we had pie: butterscotch for Ryan and mixed berry for me. We were not disappointed!

We had some serious food-walking-off to do, so after lunch, we headed to our first stop for the day, which was a local park that featured a botanical garden and a carillon.

I had no idea what a carillon even was. Do you know? It's a big bell tower, but rather than just being programed to chime on the hour (which it also does), a person actually plays songs on it. (Fun fact: there are only a couple hundred of these in the United States, and one happens to be located on the Ball State campus here in Indiana. It's called the Shafer Tower, and we visited it when we toured that county! I just didn't remember it was called a carillon.) The one in Springfield, called the Thomas Rees Carillon, is one of the largest in the world.

There are 67 bells inside this tower, and the biggest one weighs 7.5 tons. We actually got to take a tour of it, see some of the biggest bells up close, and also see the apparatus used to play the bells manually. It's kind of like an organ, but the tour guide told us you play the keys using your fists, rather than your fingers. Interesting!

The website had said during the summer, there were concerts in the afternoon on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so I built this entire portion of our trip around that information. Turns out in real life, the concerts are only on Saturday afternoons and Wednesday nights, so we didn't get to hear the bells being played. That was the only sad part of this stop!

There were some balconies up on the tower, so we got some cool views of the gardens from there!

After the tower tour, we walked through the gardens and enjoyed the flowers!

We were thankful for a beautiful (although hot!) day to tour these gardens. If you are ever planning to go, I'll let you know that there's no admission charge for the gardens themselves, but the tower tour was $4.00 a person. (And the elevator really only holds four people, so if you're claustrophobic, be prepared. It's cozy! I struggle with tight spaces, and I did alright, but it was small!)