Springfield,Iowa July 26, 27, 2016

      Monday July 25th   We stopped in the town of Amana, Iowa last night for dinner, It is an Amish town and community. It is most interesting to see all the different shops they have selling their products; like cheese, home made jams and jellies, meats and colorful clothing. I wasn't very hungry, so I had the soup of the day and hot bread. Kent and our friends all had the same meal that was cottage cheese, corn, veal, potatoes and gravy and hot bread. it was all you could eat or they called it family style. We spent the night in their RV park and we played our board game again.

       Tuesday  July 26 Today we are traveling to Springfield, Illinois and staying at the Illinois State Fairground for 2 nights and will visit the Lincoln Presidential Library and museum. It is about 260 miles and the weather is so humid and hot, there are dark thunder

clouds in the sky, I think we will be getting another hard rain storm.  The first day we went to the Lincoln Tomb which is the final resting place of Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd and three of their four sons, Edward, William and Thomas. Every Tuesday evening during a part of the summer, civil war re-enactors from the 114th Illinois Infantry conduct flag lowering ceremonies at the site. There are a lot of ladies in their beautiful dresses of the period and men in their wool suits. They wander through the crowd and talk to you and answer any questions you might have.
       Wednesday July 27   We are back at the Lincoln library- museum. It is absolutely breath taking when you walk into the first room where  you see Lincoln, Mary Todd, Edward and William dressed in their finest, standing there like they are greeting you. The White House is in the back ground and it looks huge with the ceiling looking like the sky. In another area, is Lincoln's log cabin in a setting of very tall trees and a yard like in the forest. The cabin is built to scale to the exact size of his cabin he grew up in. There
is a fireplace with a log burning with Lincoln reading a book in front and with all the home made

furniture they had. They have all of the dresses like the ones Mary wore, they have a room where Lincoln was a lawyer and the two small boys tearing the room apart having fun. It will take a few hours to see everything, but very interesting and so well done. One section shows how hard it was for him to get the States to free the slaves and the amount of men that were killed in the many battles. The total war killed over 1,000,000 solders on both sides. The Lincoln Library is one of the best Presidential libraries and we have seen and we've seen a lot of them in our travels. It contains a treasury of carefully preserved Lincoln documents and artifacts, including more than12 million items  from the Illinois historical library.  The Lincoln museum boasts more than 40,000 square feet of galleries , theaters and historical displays . His signature stovepipe hat, an original  hand written copy of the "'Gettysburg- Address",  the evening gloves from his pocket the night he was assassinated and the quill used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation are part of a rotating display of some of the most precious Lincoln artifacts. There is so much to see and it was past our lunch time when we finished seeing it all. We looked  outside and saw it was pouring buckets of rain, we debated waiting until it stopped or go for it. Everyone took off running, so I guess that meant Go For It Sharon!  The rain was as warm as a shower and we didn't mind it. The humidity is 100% here most of the time. We ate lunch and we headed over to tour the neighborhood that Lincoln lived in Springfield.  The Natl. Park service restored one square block of the  homes to its 1860's appearance, where you walk on wooden sidewalks past the homes of Lincoln's neighbors and friends, where Lincoln lived and where he spoke to a crowd of friends and supporters as he prepared to depart for Washington, DC from a platform at the train Depot in Feb. 1861, in a voice filled with emotion for the city where he had lived, worked and called home for 30 years and where he raised his family. He left Springfield on that day never to return in his lifetime. Springfield is more than just a museum, it takes you on a journey from Lincoln's humble beginnings to his rise to the Presidency.