Blogs from Springfield, Illinois, United States, North America - page 4

Hello there. Myself and my friend Alec Peachey visited my very good American friends the Messmore's in August 2007 for one week. First of all I would like to tell you how I met this fantastic family. Well, I was on holiday in Hawaii with my family for 2 weeks in 2005. We stayed there for a week and after three nights in Las Vegas, we then moved onto San Francisco for 4 nights. I met the Messmore family while I was soaking up some rays beside the hotel pool under the Hawaiian sunshine. Next to me was Joel, the dad of the family. I commented the pool and before I knew it we were chatting along nicely. I told him that I play football back home in England, that immediately raised a smile on his ... read more

For some unknown reason to us all, we woke up at 6am, So got up, got ready and was out at just gone 8. We headed down to Navy Pier for some breakfast and a cruise on Lake Michigan and nearly came back without Nige, in his wisdom (although having plastered signs all over the boat 'to remain seated AT ALL TIMES') he decided there was a 'great' photo opportunity so got up to go to the other side of the boat only to lose his footing, fall almost into 3 unsuspecting japanese tourists, to then find his footing, but slip and hit the side rails, obviously like you do, Myself and Katie were doubled up with laughter as were the japanese tourists. We then headed back to the hotel to check out and collect the ... read more

Yes, it truly was the worst coffee I have ever had! It was the color of weak tea and when you are travelling alone in an unknown part of the country with absolutely no sense of direction-well, coffee is very important. This was followed by a 30 minute check out disaster and then directions from the hotel that sent me in exactly the OPPOSITE direction from where I needed to be. By now you know that I have a very underdeveloped sense of direction and an unreliable GPS, which culminated in a 100 mile detour to get back to Toulon. I was feeling incredible pressure because I wanted to check out my Great Great grandparents Carr who I had found were buried in the Toulon cemetery, and I wanted to say goodbye to the Intrepid ... read more

28/04/07 - 29/04/07 Springfield - Chicago, Illinois Evening entertainment in Springfield - not a yellow-headed, skate-boarding Matt Groening character in sight (One episode of ‘The Simpsons’ featured a close up shot of Homer’s driving license which read ‘Springfield, NT’ - a non-existent place) but a working 2-screen Drive-In so we parked up in front of the big screen, tuned the radio to the relevant FM station, grabbed a pizza, popcorn and sodas and settled down to “Bridge to Terabithia”. We didn’t see anyone get stranded Grease-style so no whispers round the school on Monday. We bypassed the town museum and various monuments to it’s most famous resident - a certain prairie lawyer by the name Abraham Lincoln and scooted north where we popped into the Route 66 Attraction of Funk’s Grove, a Mecca for Maple sirup ... read more