more whats on
May. 5th, 2014 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacActually turned in the keys to the apt today. That means I'm finally done spending all my time over there. Soon I'll have to start spending it in the storage locker instead. Plenty of bills and other paperwork, too.
It also means I'm finally back down to something near my normal complement of keys, and can cease always pulling the wrong two sets out of my pocket every time I want one.
So I thought I'd write, not about my convention in Chicago last month, but about what else I did beforehand. I took a couple days and drove a ways downstate.
Springfield is less All Abe All The Time than I'd expected. Though a cordon sanitaire of four city blocks around his house has been restored to its 1850s appearance - everything but the horses, and what the horses leave behind - so you can experience not just the house but the neighborhood. And learning about Lincoln's neighbors and the shops he patronized and all his daily life seems to be the brunt of the educational mission there.
A big, newish multi-media museum on Abe's life was a bit of a hoot and worth the fee. Strong emphasis on what most people don't know. You learn more about how the public and the media excoriated Lincoln during his presidency than on his successes, and more about arguments against issuing the Emancipation Proclamation than ones in favor.
Best parts were 1) a mock TV report on the 1860 election, hosted by Tim Russert, including hokey 20-second commercials for each candidate. Found room for cute in-jokes like "Paid for by Little Giants for Douglas." Actually a good layman's introduction to the issues and positions of this most confusing of US presidential elections. 2) A day-by-day (week-by-week? I forget) animated map of the nation during the war, showing who held what territory when. Easy to observe how much the armies tended to hibernate during the winter. 3) Off in obscure side cabinets, some genuine Lincoln artifacts, a bit of a surprise in an intensely artificial museum.
Springfield seemed a modestly prosperous town - there was none of the desolated look I've seen to the south as close as Cairo here in central Illinois - but locals told me that stores have been going out of business rapidly in recent years. I didn't see any rows of vacant storefronts.
There were still restaurants. For lunch, Maldaner's downtown claims to have been around for 130 years. Basic meat-driven place, though the veggies were the tastiest. I'm just sorry I couldn't get there for dinner when they have Beef Wellington, a dish I haven't seen for 130 (well, 30) years myself. Instead for dinner I went to what claims to be a Chesapeake seafood restaurant. Oh, don't. Decor and food look great, but the taste ... just don't.
After Springfield, I visited not one, but two 1840s religious colonies, communal settlements of a group driven out of their previous home, led by a charismatic leader who ran everything until he was shot to death at an early age, after which the colony drifted apart, leaving what today is a small, boutique village.
That description fits Nauvoo, home of the Mormons until Joseph Smith was hauled from jail by angry free-speech advocates, but it also fits Bishop Hill, 100 miles to the NE, founded in 1846, two years after Smith's death, by pietist dissident Lutherans who'd been encouraged to leave Sweden. The main difference is that after their leader was shot in 1850 (by an excommunicant angry at having his wife wooed back to the church), instead of mostly packing up and moving west, the Bishop Hillfolk split up the communal property and mostly stayed put. Now they have a couple of restored buildings with docents who'll talk your ear off, a quaint general store which sells books of Norwegian jokes and a half-pound bag of freshly ground raspberry chocolate coffee, the latter of which I brought home and made my B. very happy. Also an intensely hemlighet, I believe the Swedish word is, little lunchroom staffed by sensible women in farmwife clothes, decorated as if it were their parlor, open to the pots bubbling away on the kitchen stove. There I had Swedish meatballs, much richer, thicker-textured, and gamier (in the good sense, not an off-tasting sense) than most of what I've had as Swedish meatballs at Ikea or elsewhere. Probably more authentic this way.
Bishop Hill is all mushed together. Nauvoo, by contrast, is two half-towns: the modern boutique town up on the bluff, and the historic one, mostly empty lawns with a few scattered surviving buildings, down by the river. It's the scene of cut-throat tourist-attraction competition, in that genteel Mormon way, between the LDS church and the Reorganizeds (now blandly called the Community of Christ), each of which has its own visitor center, its own tours, and its own favorite buildings. I went with the Reorganizeds, because they're less soapily evangelistic and they owned the better set of buildings.
I also ventured as near as may be to the river junction where meet Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Why? Because I could. Quick visits to Keokuk, Iowa, for what claimed to be an Iowan meal (Wisconsin cheese soup and chicken fried steak?), and to neighboring Alexandria, Missouri, for cheap fuel. You're probably not familiar with Alexandria, which appears to consist of two houses, four gas stations, and six fireworks stands.
And on my way downstate from Chicago, at a town called - let's check the map, here - Morris, Illinois, I ate at Culver's, the Wisconsin-based fast-food burger chain that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gerisullivan and holyoutlaw so enthusiastically pointed me to. I liked the basic original burger, which had crunchy meat and which came with nothing on it I don't like except a pickle, but why it was called a butter burger escaped me. I had the deuce of a time trying to order just a plain frozen custard and not turn it into a "concrete mixer", whatever that may be, but when I got one, it was pretty good too, though less relentlessly thick than the kind I found in Oklahoma. For a quick on-the-road meal, thumbs up, and considering how much I dislike the most famous burger chains, that's a big win.
It also means I'm finally back down to something near my normal complement of keys, and can cease always pulling the wrong two sets out of my pocket every time I want one.
So I thought I'd write, not about my convention in Chicago last month, but about what else I did beforehand. I took a couple days and drove a ways downstate.
Springfield is less All Abe All The Time than I'd expected. Though a cordon sanitaire of four city blocks around his house has been restored to its 1850s appearance - everything but the horses, and what the horses leave behind - so you can experience not just the house but the neighborhood. And learning about Lincoln's neighbors and the shops he patronized and all his daily life seems to be the brunt of the educational mission there.
A big, newish multi-media museum on Abe's life was a bit of a hoot and worth the fee. Strong emphasis on what most people don't know. You learn more about how the public and the media excoriated Lincoln during his presidency than on his successes, and more about arguments against issuing the Emancipation Proclamation than ones in favor.
Best parts were 1) a mock TV report on the 1860 election, hosted by Tim Russert, including hokey 20-second commercials for each candidate. Found room for cute in-jokes like "Paid for by Little Giants for Douglas." Actually a good layman's introduction to the issues and positions of this most confusing of US presidential elections. 2) A day-by-day (week-by-week? I forget) animated map of the nation during the war, showing who held what territory when. Easy to observe how much the armies tended to hibernate during the winter. 3) Off in obscure side cabinets, some genuine Lincoln artifacts, a bit of a surprise in an intensely artificial museum.
Springfield seemed a modestly prosperous town - there was none of the desolated look I've seen to the south as close as Cairo here in central Illinois - but locals told me that stores have been going out of business rapidly in recent years. I didn't see any rows of vacant storefronts.
There were still restaurants. For lunch, Maldaner's downtown claims to have been around for 130 years. Basic meat-driven place, though the veggies were the tastiest. I'm just sorry I couldn't get there for dinner when they have Beef Wellington, a dish I haven't seen for 130 (well, 30) years myself. Instead for dinner I went to what claims to be a Chesapeake seafood restaurant. Oh, don't. Decor and food look great, but the taste ... just don't.
After Springfield, I visited not one, but two 1840s religious colonies, communal settlements of a group driven out of their previous home, led by a charismatic leader who ran everything until he was shot to death at an early age, after which the colony drifted apart, leaving what today is a small, boutique village.
That description fits Nauvoo, home of the Mormons until Joseph Smith was hauled from jail by angry free-speech advocates, but it also fits Bishop Hill, 100 miles to the NE, founded in 1846, two years after Smith's death, by pietist dissident Lutherans who'd been encouraged to leave Sweden. The main difference is that after their leader was shot in 1850 (by an excommunicant angry at having his wife wooed back to the church), instead of mostly packing up and moving west, the Bishop Hillfolk split up the communal property and mostly stayed put. Now they have a couple of restored buildings with docents who'll talk your ear off, a quaint general store which sells books of Norwegian jokes and a half-pound bag of freshly ground raspberry chocolate coffee, the latter of which I brought home and made my B. very happy. Also an intensely hemlighet, I believe the Swedish word is, little lunchroom staffed by sensible women in farmwife clothes, decorated as if it were their parlor, open to the pots bubbling away on the kitchen stove. There I had Swedish meatballs, much richer, thicker-textured, and gamier (in the good sense, not an off-tasting sense) than most of what I've had as Swedish meatballs at Ikea or elsewhere. Probably more authentic this way.
Bishop Hill is all mushed together. Nauvoo, by contrast, is two half-towns: the modern boutique town up on the bluff, and the historic one, mostly empty lawns with a few scattered surviving buildings, down by the river. It's the scene of cut-throat tourist-attraction competition, in that genteel Mormon way, between the LDS church and the Reorganizeds (now blandly called the Community of Christ), each of which has its own visitor center, its own tours, and its own favorite buildings. I went with the Reorganizeds, because they're less soapily evangelistic and they owned the better set of buildings.
I also ventured as near as may be to the river junction where meet Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Why? Because I could. Quick visits to Keokuk, Iowa, for what claimed to be an Iowan meal (Wisconsin cheese soup and chicken fried steak?), and to neighboring Alexandria, Missouri, for cheap fuel. You're probably not familiar with Alexandria, which appears to consist of two houses, four gas stations, and six fireworks stands.
And on my way downstate from Chicago, at a town called - let's check the map, here - Morris, Illinois, I ate at Culver's, the Wisconsin-based fast-food burger chain that
gerisullivan and holyoutlaw so enthusiastically pointed me to. I liked the basic original burger, which had crunchy meat and which came with nothing on it I don't like except a pickle, but why it was called a butter burger escaped me. I had the deuce of a time trying to order just a plain frozen custard and not turn it into a "concrete mixer", whatever that may be, but when I got one, it was pretty good too, though less relentlessly thick than the kind I found in Oklahoma. For a quick on-the-road meal, thumbs up, and considering how much I dislike the most famous burger chains, that's a big win.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 04:54 am (UTC)Even though I'm from Illinois, I've only been to Springfield once (obligatory school trip in 8th grade) and never to Nauvoo or Bishop Hill. Interesting trip report! Someday I will travel more to visit places, not just drive past them.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 07:33 am (UTC)The beef version (as well as a salmon based one) are still very popular hereabouts.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 11:14 pm (UTC)