Follow The Red Brick Road

Before we get started, we realized that we forgot to thank the Chicago peeps for Saturday night. SueAnn, Eric, Kevin : Thank you so very much for meeting up with us to kick off this trip. It was great seeing all of you and we extend an offer to you (and the Springfield peeps as well) to come visit Atlanta.

Now... onto the blog. :)

The Route 66 Hotel & Conference Center was not a bad place to stay on Sunday night. Definitely a drop down from the Hotel Burham, but still good for the $. Our only complaint was that the service at their restaurant was slow... supposedly due to a brand new waffle maker.

In any rate, after breakfast and checking out, we went to the Lincoln Museum. We can sum up this place in only one word ... WOW! For only $7.50 per adult, we got to learn everything that there was about Abraham Lincoln and his family; his early childhood years, the law practice in Springfield, his eventual rise to Presidency and ultimately his death.

There are 2 theaters in the museum - Lincoln's Eyes and Ghosts in the Library. Both were very good; Eyes is a little "Disney-like"... but Ghosts was something that I had never seen before. There was also an area for special exhibits; right now, it is on Mary Todd Lincoln. Again, very well done... talking about her life which eventually lead to her being committed by her remaining son, Robert.

From the Museum, we drove a couple of miles to Lincoln's Tomb. A very beautiful structure. Not only is Abe Lincoln's casket inside, but also a mausoleum for the rest of the Lincoln family as well as models of sculptures of Abe and a placard on where the actual is displayed.

The only thing that disturbed this visit were rude people. Despite a sign at the entrance stating that out of respect of the family, please be quiet... that didn't stop people from talking in their normal voice inside.

After the Tomb, we drove to Cozy Dog Drive-In for lunch. This place is considered to be one of the first inventors of the corn dog; so naturally, we had to have a couple. Verdict ... not bad. Definitely not gourmet, but good road food.

With that, Jeff took over the driving for this leg of trip; Springfield-Stauton-Springfield-Edwardsville. Yep - you are reading that correctly; we did a bit of a loop yesterday. The first part was along the original routing of 66 (1926-1930); mainly on Illinois 4. This included 1.4 miles of brick road that you see a picture of at the top of this entry.

When we got into Staunton, we cut across the city to I-55 and headed north for almost 50 miles to the outskirts of Springfield... where we got gas for the first time this trip. We had bled the tank dry, so while the $50 fillup was not surprising, it was still a bit of a shock.

We then headed back south along the Post-1930 Route 66 back to Staunton; which follows I-55 (but is only on it for a couple of miles). It was interesting to see the difference between the two routings. Where IL-4 goes through several small towns, the post-1930 route skirts along the outskirts; kind of how the Interstate system follows today.

South of Staunton, we went through the town of Hamel and then Edwardsville; home of one of the campuses for Southern Illinois University. We stayed at the Comfort Inn just off the Route; at the top of a hill in which you can make out the Mississippi River and Saint Louis.

As always - check out our photos in our online gallery and please leave any comments.

Ilana & Jeff