Springfield, or Where One Road Becomes Three

Springfield is the capital of Illinois.  It is also where the 16th President of the United States is buried.  So... upon hitting town, we followed the signs to Lincoln's tomb.  This is technically off the route by a few blocks.

The monument is beautiful.  It's an obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument in DC.  Smaller.  And there are a good number of statues at the base.  We couldn't go up near the statues due to the stairways being closed off.  It's a shame.  There were engravings of the states' names at the foot of the monument.  We wanted to see which ones were listed.  I have a hunch (without looking it up on Wikipedia or some such) that they are the names of the states of the union at the end of the Civil War.  But, I honestly have no idea.

At the base of the whole monument is a large bronze bust of Lincoln (really just his head).  It's huge.  And it has a very shiny nose.  (Insert reindeer joke here).  Apparently people rub his nose for good luck.  Seems odd to me.

We had a lovely chat about how much of the world we now live in has come to be due to what Lincoln did during his time in office.  This trip is giving us a lot of things to reflect on.

So... once we were done at the monument, we headed out again to rediscover the path of 66 through Springfield.  Since I'm writing this two days later, I'm able to comment on something really cool that Illinois does along the trek, that I can at least tell you that Missouri does not: IL marks each former alignment of Route 66 with signs that indicate which one you're on.  So, at certain points you can opt to take the 1930-1939 alignment rather than the 1940-1955 alignment, and so on.

As we headed toward a site we'd predetermined for our dinner break, we ended up on a chunk of 1927-1930 alignment through downtown Springfield.  Here the road is split 3 ways.  We ended up on a segment that was from a little later on, but we missed out on a number of the Springfield sites that were along other alignments.  Possibly most noteworthy would be the sibling of the Gemini Giant and Paul Bunyon.  We'd've had to go along the Western-most alignment to find him.  We went straight down the center and since it was just about supper time...

 We stopped by the Cozy Dog Drive-In.  This place claims to be the first place to make corn dogs/pronto pups.  We stopped at another of the Route 66 info signs, and this time I remembered to take a photo of the passport emblem.  I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the raised edges of the emblems are supposed to be used to make rubbings in a souvenir passport.  Not having one of those, I opted for snapping a photo.

We'd now made it half of the way across the state.  We'd spent all but a few minutes off the interstate, but in order to get to Saint Louis before midnight, we opted to take the 66 alignment that was covered by I-55 for much of the rest of the trip.  We made one more stop before crossing into MO.  That'll be in the next post.