Travel Blog and Photo Gallery

Seven score and nine years ago Abraham Lincoln made his now infamous “four score and seven years ago” speech, two years before he was assassinated. He is considered one of America’s finest and most influential presidents, and revered in Springfield, Illinois, where he spent much of his adult life and is now buried alongside most of his family. On Wednesday morning, we checked out the Lincoln memorial and tomb where he is buried, before heading into downtown Springfield to see the Lincoln museum. We also had a tour of the house he land his family lived, which is now owned by the state.

In the way to our next stop, we called in at the Cozy Dog Drive In, which offers “cozy dogs” – kind of battered hot dogs on a stick. It was recommended by a number of guides we looked at and understandably – they were fab! Further along the road we encountered Henry’s Rabbit Ranch, a small converted petrol station where a somewhat eccentric man named Henry sits in a store with about ten rabbits selling various bits of tat and anthropomorphising the rabbits by talking about them as if they were people. A nice enough guy but possibly a little mad! Thursday brought us to the Gateway Arch, a monumental arch in St Louis just by the Mississippi river that towers 630 ft into the sky. You can reach the top of these by means of these weird capsules that seat five people at a time and are a strange cross between a lift and a Ferris wheel. From the top, though, again the views of the city were amazing and we got some brilliant photos. On the way to our stop for this evening, we stopped off at Ted Drewes frozen custard stand, a renowned venue in St Louis for delicious – which we can now vouch for – ice creams, well worth a stop. On from here to the Meramec Caverns, a set of caverns that were used quite extensively for both hideouts and materials during the American Civil War, and was also the hideout for fugitive Jesse James, though inexplicably this is never mentioned in the Cher song! As caverns go, this was pretty amazing, with some incredibly old and intricate looking stalactites and stalagmites. Finally, we checked out the World’s largest rocking chair, which like most things on Route 66 is completely random but somewhat impressive.

Having covered around abt a fifth of our 2500 mile drive, it is has been pleasant driving so far. The original Route 66 comes and goes so some of it is interstate, some of it is single carriageway, and small amounts of it is pretty much dirt track. Also, signs come and go – possibly because someone has nicked them for their collection – making it difficult to stay true to the original at times. It all adds to the experience though!

A second Springfield, this time in Missouri, is our destination for tomorrow, and I’ll try and update again when we hit Oklahoma on Saturday evening.

After a long but pretty painless 22 hours of travelling, we picked up our car and checked into our Chicago hotel on Monday night. A ludicrously early start on Tuesday morning meant that we were able to get breakfast before anyone else in the hotel, before heading to the interstate to join every other Tom, Dick and Harry trying to get into downtown Chicago during early rush hour. Worth it when we arrived at Chicago, though, and checked out Lake Michigan (which is massive, and also surprisingly clear), before heading to the official start of Route 66 on foot to get our photo with the sign. The guy we handed the camera to to get a joint photo took a couple of semi-decent ones, but the highlight was the one where he decided to ignore the sign altogether and just take a photo of the lamppost instead! I haven’t uploaded that one! We also went up Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower), which at 1,451ft tall is the tallest building in the Western hemisphere. The views of Chicago from the top were incredible, and one of the highlights of taking the elevator to the top was the so-called “sky boxes” – four kind of glass balconies that jut out from the top enabling you to walk out and see the ground 103 floors below you – quite spectacular.

After a bite to eat in the Hard Rock Cafe, we headed out along Route 66, making it a whole 0.5 miles before encountering a road closure and having to divert off the very road we’d just flown 4,000 miles to drive along! Fortunately we were back on track before long.

Once out of the city, the draw of Route 66 moves from the commercial to the wonderfully quirky or downright weird. Our first stop was at a place with a statue outside called the Gemini Giant. An imposing, 28 foot tall man wearing a helmet and holding a rocket for no apparent reason, he is the first of many random and bizarre sights people have erected alongside Route 66 in order to, basically, keep people coming back to Route 66.

The next stop, the Polka Dot Drive In, a completely unremarkable venue aside from the fact there are four life size statues outside of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Betty Boo. I can’t see any immediate connection between the four of them, especially given one of them isn’t even real, yet they stand proudly together outside this place, solely to draw people in.

We’re now in Springfield, IL. Is this the one The Simpsons live in? No, but Abraham Lincoln did, and was also buried here, so tomorrow we’re off to check out his tomb and one of the many museums that pay homage to him. Hope everyone back home is okay; don’t forget you can leave a comment below if you wish – it doesn’t matter if you give a real email address or not. See you soon!