One Last Stop

I solemnly promise not to spend three days recapping every day of our trip. But our first day was possibly the most activity-heavy of them all! After we'd seen the botanical gardens, the carillon, and all the Lincoln spots we could squeeze in, we still did a couple more fun things!

The first was a stop at Scheels. I'd never heard of it before, but probably some of you have. It's a massive sporting goods/outdoor fun store that probably dwarfs any and all other such stores you've ever been to. Yes. Even the big ones. I thought Ryan would enjoy that in and of itself, but this store has SO MANY other things. You know. Aquariums. Photo opps. A Ferris Wheel. A restaurant. You could kind of live in here, I think. So we decided to check it out!

200,000 square feet in case you were wondering.

Photo opps in the entry? OKAY!!!

A portion of the ginormous aquarium:

Did I mention the Ferris Wheel?

That last picture (sorry, Ryan) is just to give you some perspective on how truly massive it is.

They also had this display of various wildlife.

An airplane...

Photo opps and props!

That last one is my nod to Tim Hawkins' "Hand Raising" example of "My fish was this big." If you have no idea what I'm talking about, watch this. (Also watch that if you're having a bad day. I dare you not to smile!)

It was a fun store to walk around! And they truly did have e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. you could need.

Our last stop in Springfield, before heading to our first Airbnb, was at the Cozy Dog. It's an official stop on Route 66, and I felt our trip needed an official Route 66 stop.

Remember how I told you my attempts to be healthy at lunch sort of failed because the restaurant had run out of chicken and my backup salad came drowning in dressing? Well I regret to inform you it didn't get any better here. LOL!!! I knew it was a hot dog joint and those aren't healthy no matter how you spin the story, but I told Ryan I'd be okay. I'd just not eat the bun.

We decided to split the fries, too. That would make it better.

Well.

You be the judge.

(There were actually four dogs...Ryan had already started eating one when I took this picture.)

Apparently a cozy dog is cozy inside the deep fried batter. Tip for you: if you ever eat here, don't say to the employees, "Oh so it's like a corn dog!" Yes it is like a corn dog if you're needing a descriptor, but apparently they ruffle a bit at that. It's a COZY dog. ;)

So I just decided to enjoy the experience...and the food. My word, it was good. And the diner was full of character:

We would absolutely recommend this to anyone not counting calories who wants a fun experience. We loved it! And now you've seen our whole day in Springfield. :) It was such fun. We headed to our Airbnb and enjoyed a relaxing evening together (and spent some time getting to know the hosts, as I mentioned in my earlier post).

We slept in a bit the next morning, got ready slowly, packed up the car, and headed for stop #2: Kansas City!

Land of Lincoln

Yesterday I told you about our fun sightseeing in Springfield, Illinois - touring the carillon and botanical gardens. We were just getting started on our day!

If you don't know this, Springfield was where President Abraham Lincoln lived as an adult. He worked in politics there until he became president and had intended to return there to live after his presidency, but of course he didn't live to see that day.

I actually visited Springfield with my parents back in 1987, but Ryan had never been there. We decided we'd see the Lincoln sites (most of them anyway) while we were there! Fun fact, if you ever decide to visit: most of these locations are absolutely free to tour. We made donations in a couple of spots, but this is a very affordable activity if you're on a budget and/or have kids!

We started at Lincoln's tomb:

You'll notice his shiny nose on the bronze bust. No, he doesn't have T-zone issues. :) People rub his nose for good luck, and it's become quite shiny over the years. Behind that bust is the front door to the area actually containing the tomb.

Just inside the door is the location where his casket was last open (so said the tour guide) and now it holds a smaller version of the statue found at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

Once you enter the building, you walk around a circular hallway filled with bronze statues that depict Lincoln at different points in his life. Here's an example:

In the back is his actual tomb:

Ryan and I did a few photo opps outside, too:

The similarities are astounding.

The tour guide also told us about a spot down the hill behind the tomb where Lincoln's body rested while the final burial site was being prepared, so we went to see that, too.

We weren't sure the appropriate face one should make while posing with a vault. This is probably not it:

(Actually I think we look that American Gothic couple. Sigh. Fail.)

After leaving the cemetery, we went into downtown Springfield to see some historical sights there. First of all, allow me to say they have a public parking garage underground, and it is seriously the nicest parking garage I've ever seen. They usually freak me out as creepy places that might land you on Dateline, but this was spacious, well-lit, and very nice. Props to Springfield.

We toured the Old State Capitol Building, which is set up inside to resemble what it would have looked like back in the day. Here are a few of the bazillion pictures I took.

The official Lincoln Ledger is on display at a bank downtown. People had such nice handwriting back in the day.

Ryan found some statues:

Before we left, we went to tour the Lincoln home. I actually had never been through this before because back in 1987, it was undergoing extensive renovations, and it was closed to the public. Fun fact (that you already know if you heard the podcast): This area is a national park! So park rangers serve as the tour guides to go through Lincoln's home. I always think of national parks as being areas with lots of trails and trees (and possibly bears) so this kind of threw me!

It's absolutely free to go through (thanks to Lincoln's son who donated the home with the stipulation that no one would ever be charged to walk through it) but you do have to get a ticket. They have to take people through in small groups because homes of this era were not exactly open concept. It's a tight squeeze! So your ticket ties you to your group of a dozen or so people, and you go through when the time on your ticket says it's your turn!

(Totally random fact for you: In our group was a couple who road tripped from Brazil to the United States. Yes. Brazil the country. Someone asked them how far they went and they said ALASKA! Can you imagine riding in a car from Brazil to Alaska??? They were in Springfield because their current adventure involves driving Route 66, and Springfield is part of that.)

Anyway! Lincoln's home:

The bedroom above was the master, and the ranger told us Mrs. Lincoln suffered from horrible migraines. Someone in our group muttered, "I see why with this wallpaper!" (It made me giggle.) The ranger said the interior includes some pieces that were original to the home and the rest have been recreated based on drawings of the home. Back in Lincoln's day, reporters would send artists to draw the interiors of homes for newspapers and such, so they used the artists' renderings to know what the rooms should look like. The only thing the drawings didn't tell them? Color.

Here's a little treasure for you as we part ways today. I'd unearthed some of my pictures from my original visit with my parents. You know what that means! PHOTO RECREATIONS!!!

When I pulled out my phone to ask a park ranger to take that last photo with the house, she got SO EXCITED. Apparently she's not seen many pictures of the house mid-renovation. She called other rangers over to look at it and then helped me recreate it!

We didn't get to everything on the list, because we were the last tour before the Lincoln house closed for the day. We didn't get to the train depot or the family pew in the church and a couple of other small photo opps, but we felt we made the most of the time we had, and we learned a lot!

(Again: we totally recommend this as a great, affordable location to visit if you live in the Midwest!)

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!)

Things I Learned in July

Before I enlighten you on all the things I learned in July, I have a super-sized episode of Spill the Beans for you! It's full of the short version of our road trip, including our near disaster. (It wouldn't be a Shaffer road trip without a little drama, now would it?)

Listen here!

SOMEHOW it has come to be the last day of July. I honestly have no idea how that happened. I may have taken a vacation, but it wasn't from learning! Some little tidbits I picked up in July include...

1. Now I know about Copic Markers.

I'd never heard of them before. Have you? Apparently they're the grown up of all grown up markers and you can do all sorts of fancy things with them. While it definitely sounds like something I need, I notice they also come with a hefty price tag, so maybe I'll just be an admirer from afar? (Here's the beginner's guide to knowing all about them if you're in the dark like I was.)



2. Blue jay feathers are not actually blue.

I met this really super talented artist back in my IWU days. She was a student when I worked there and she and her apartment-mates frequently sat out on their porch in the evenings, which put them right along my walking path. I often stopped to talk to them and struck up a friendship that continues now through Facebook. Heidi is a watercolor artist, and I enjoy following her career. This month she was working on a blue jay painting and said this:

The blue color in blue jay feathers is an illusion. If you were to crush up a feather, the blue would disappear and you would be left with a brownish-grey dust. This is caused by the (differential) scattering of light through modified cells on the surface of the feather barbs. I could go into further detail, but I really just wanted to say how funny I find the irony of trying to recreate the specific blue of these birds in watercolor when it does not necessarily exist. 

Who knew?



3. I should not get weighed every day.

You may or may not remember (and it's okay if you don't) that the day after my 40th birthday, I set out on a mission to re-lose the weight I had re-gained after losing weight two years ago. I hadn't gained it all back, but enough that I wanted to get a grip on it. The plan I decided to use called for a daily weigh-in, mostly with the intent of learning the body's patterns of gain and loss. Well, as I reported last month, one thing I learned is that I have no patterns. I just have a weird, weird body that doesn't always do what it "should."

Early in July, Ryan (ever so kindly) asked if I would consider breaking the program rules to get weighed weekly instead because the daily madness of finding out I hadn't budged (or worse...gained) didn't always bring out the prettiest side of me. Since a daily weigh in wasn't accomplishing what it was supposed to anyway, I agreed, and moved to weekly. THAT is much better for me. I don't stress nearly as much now. I'm still careful. I'm still losing. I'm just not as crazy obsessed.

* To be fair, I did know this before July. I know I shouldn't weigh often because I get 100% numbers obsessed. But July confirmed it.



4. There are slow cookers that can plug into your car.

Did you know this? When we stayed at our first Airbnb home, the host told us about these little slow cookers that plug right into your car! (12 volt power source.) You can cook on the road! Think of how much sooner we can eat Sunday lunch now!! (I'm kidding.) (Kind of.)



5. Twelve volt power source is what you now call the cigarette lighter in your car.

I've known for a while now that you weren't supposed to call it the cigarette lighter, but now I know what you actually SHOULD call it.



6. We love Airbnb.

You caught the bigger version of this story in yesterday's post, but I'll still state it as something learned this month! We had three wonderful (and distinctly unique) experiences, but we're sold. I think this may be our new form of lodging in the future. (Until we get our RV, of course. HA!) I will do a post soon to tell you all about it. The Airbnb experience. Not an RV.


How about you? Learn anything fun in July?