Sunday we slept in a while, left our room in Springfield, Il around 9:30 AM
and toured the downtown area surrounding Lincoln's home. The entire
neighborhood of about 5 or 6 blocks has been restored to original and the
cobblestone streets are open only to pedestrians-plenty of picture ops. Very
nicely done with people walking around in period clothing answering questions
and telling the story. We car toured the rest of downtown and got on our way
about 10:30 or 11. North we went on Hwy 97 in the cool late morning, top down
by the way. The terrain was sort of flat at this point still tooling thru
corn fields as far as we could see. Someplace just south of Havana (not
Castro type) we came across a large field of sun flowers. I whipped the car
around, thank goodness no one else was traveling near us, and pulled up onto
the grass beside the flowers for several very nice pictures. At that moment a
crop duster came barreling down on us landing approaching its runway. The
plane was a yellow color exactly like the sun flowers, neat sight. We had
already seen a couple of these crop dusters in action. They really maneuver
quite well around obstacles such as power lines and buildings. I'm not
completely sure but it sounded like one was powered by an electric motor so it
may have been an RC built to full scale. Hate to be in a steep dive and have
a recharge light come on the panel if it was manned.
We ate lunch in Havana where we met some motorcycle tourists from
Chicago. They admired the car and said we had about 350 miles to go before
Galena. That worried me because I had figured we only had 252 mi. to go from
Springfield and we had already traveled about 50 mi to Havana. We thought
then we'd never get to Conclave before dark since it was already 2PM. Then we
realized we had gone thru a time zone-we were still on EDT, made us feel a
little better!! Soon we crossed the Il. River Bridge and the terrain changed
abruptly to beautiful rolling hills.
See part 2
George
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