Traveling-with-TLC

May 8: Lincoln Country and Sangchris Lake

The Lincoln Presidential Library is highly recommended on a couple of traveling blogs we have been following. Goodness, they were right! Downtown Springfield seems almost a shrine to the 16th president. The Library has an interesting layout. There are 2 multi-media presentations to put Lincoln’s life and impact into prospective and 2 multi-room exhibits. One exhibit begins with a re-creation of Lincoln’s log cabin and guides the visitor through Lincoln’s formative years and early career until he leaves for the White House. The second exhibit starts with a re-creation of the White House rotunda and leads through the presidency, the war, and aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. It was quite moving.

I was really impressed with the first multi-media presentation we watched. An historian described why the objects in the library/museum should be preserved. As he described an object, a holographic “ghost” interacted with the artifact. It was pretty wild. We weren’t even sure if the actor was real or a hologram himself. Fascinating technology.

After the museum and a REALLY long wait for lunch (it was Mother’s Day), we went to the National Park which houses Lincoln’s Springfield home. The entire street has been restored complete with boardwalks instead of sidewalks. Pretty cool:

After playing tourist, we headed to our campground at Sangchris Lake. Goodness, really it was just as lovely as the last couple of lake campgrounds. Although this was a large, relatively busy campground, we had an entire loop to ourselves. It felt like a private lake with a dock. And; oh my, the sunset!!