Mississippi Arches and Authors, and ole Honest Abe

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We stopped at St. Louis and took plenty of pictures of the arch...arch from the bridge, arch from the road, paul with arch, danielle with arch, arch with both of us...etc etc...haha. Yay Gateway Arch! St. Louis is the "Gateway to the West"...and while you can actually go up in the arch and look around from the observatory, we both got there too late and Danielle's a little scared of rickety elevators at great heights.

Then we stopped at Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's hometown. Everything there is named for him or his characters, like the Mark Twain Dinette featureing Mark Twain Fried Chicken and homemade root beer. We sampled the chicken, climbed up Cardiff Hill over statues of Tom and Huck, and wandered around the town where his boyhood home is kept open for tours.

Next stop: Springfield, IL, after a quick detour to hit Iowa for a few miles. In springfield we went to Lincoln's tomb, where a bust of Lincoln sits out front with a polised bronze nose. Polished? Yep...by many, many hand. It's said that if you touch his nose, it brings you luck. So, after touching his nose we went inside, heard the story of the site (it's been refurbished several times), and headed downtown. The National Park Service owns seven blocks that they've restored to the year 1860, Lincoln's election to Presidency, because that's exactly where Lincoln lived with his family until that year. His house still stands, with all of the rooms recreated to look exactly as they did, based on drawings and descriptions from visitors. We learned a lot about how the family lived and a little about the man himself. There's a brand new Lincoln Presidential Museum in town as well, but we decided to skip it and go out for corn dogs.

Corn dogs?? Mmm Hmm...The original corn dogs, called cozy dogs, were created at the cozy dog drive in. Unfortunately, the drive in was closed on Sunday!!! So, no Cozy Dogs...but we made up for it by stopping to see the rocketman a hundred miles away on our way up past Chicago to our friends' place in Wisconsin. We opted to skip Chicago because it's the only city, other than San Francisco, that we've both been to recently and have seen all the sights at. We did drive through on the interstate, so we gazed out at the familiar skyline and reminiced a bit. We'll probably go back, as friends are moving there soon, but for now, onward ho!

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