Sourdough, Friends, & Lincoln In Illinois

Travel Day to Illinois to see friends. We meet them back in 2024 when we wintered (Jan-Feb) all around Florida. They are so fun, sweet, and love games. They, along with two other friends, and us would play games most every night in the game room at the campground. Wonderful times and memories.

Our friends have wanted us to come to their farm since then and it finally worked out this year. We slept in and got packed up. I had thought we would leave St Peters, Missouri, around 10:00 a.m. After getting packed up, Kevin went to Circle K for fuel and drinks and then hooked up. Wouldn’t ya know, we pulled out at exactly 10:00 a.m. on the dot. HA The drive was very nice; good weather, although a bit windy, and good roads. Traffic was easy around St Louis; only got some traffic on I-55 north, probably people/trucks going to Chicago. But it wasn’t crowded at all. We sure liked seeing all the farm ground. Our friends live way out in the country. Fields everywhere and looking good. Lots of corn. (A reminder here: Kevin and I both grew up on hobby farms. We like seeing the farms but we won’t want one.)

One day our friend drove us around through little towns and over to Lincoln. Autio (footnote 1) told us about Abraham Lincoln and how he help set up this town and the college named itself for him shortly before he died. It is the last place named for him when he was living. It sure is fun to see the farming communities and little towns – one might even have a post office. 🙂 We mailed my cards from Middletown Post Office. 

SOURDOUGH STARTER!

Today was a lot of cooking for our friend and I watched. HA First thing she did was start to do the Sourdough. She talked a lot about the Sourdough Starter “ah, just add 321, or 221, or 111” amounts. HA She measures with a scale everything that has to do with the starter – starter, bread, rolls, etc. It was fun to see the tools she uses. She has a hand held Food Saver-type vacuum sealer that I immediately sent the amazon link to Kevin. That is just so much easier to use than getting my big Food Saver machine out just to seal up brown sugar. Not five minutes later he texted that it should be here by Friday. Love it! Our friend made English muffins and sent a dozen home (footnote 2) with us. Then later she made some rolls to go with the lasagna I made for dinner for all of us. 

My Sourdough Starter is in the fridge! I had been mulling over in my brain the past few months that I would like to make sourdough bread in HOWE (footnote 3). When we were first married, I made Amish Friendship Bread from a starter (not the sweet bread kind). It was so much fun to fed, make, and eat. Then I got a bread machine and used that for years. My recipes from the bread machine say I last made them in 2016. 🤣 Then when we were at Silver Dollar City, Branson, Missouri, this past April, I saw a lot of sourdough starter things in the mill shop there. It got me thinking more about sourdough. I bought a jar for the starter and a dry pack of starter but didn’t use them. So now, my friend is showing me all sorts of delicious things to make with Sourdough Starter and I wanted to try it. I don’t carry our large Dutch oven in HOWE because it is so heavy but found I can use other pans to bake in. 😋 She gave me some of her Sourdough Starter.

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. This museum we rank as maybe our most favorite presidential museums. There are mannequins that look real. They are throughout many scenes of Lincoln’s life. For example, him swooning with a look as he gazes at Mary on the couch. Another one is of him and his cabinet debating the Proclamation. It made me feel like a fly on the wall and felt like you were watching the real thing. 

The website says for the deaf to ask for “reflective captioning” and so we did. It is a device that reflects the back of the theaters where the words are on the wall backwards. The first theater we watched was of a guy in the library and him telling about things they have found. It looked like the guy was on a stage with AI adding touches, like a feather pen writing and then disappearing. At the end, as the guy says he died in the civil war, he fades from his feet to his top. Hum…how did they do that, we asked each other afterwards. Oh, it must be a hologram. The next theater was an overview of his life. Again, done excellent and with a hologram. You can walk through a cabin that looks like the one he lived in as a boy. One place shows Lincoln on the couch reading the newspaper and his boys have made a mess of the law office! The sign even quotes his law partner. You see the scene with Lincoln, Mary, their friends, and the murderer. Again, makes it feel like you are there and watching it happen. We stopped in for lunch at the cafe and then walked through the bookstore. I really wanted to get a book about Mary Todd Lincoln but surprisingly, there wasn’t even one. Then we decided to go back to the first theater and watch it again. Low and behold our shock…it was a different “hologram” person than we saw this morning. What? Hum. Maybe he is real? There is music happening with the captions so if it is a real guy, he had to be right on the mark with words. Oh, that got us to thinking! 

Next we drove to Oak Ridge Cemetery where Lincoln, Mary, and three of their four sons are buried. It is a monstrous building and only 5 people buried inside. Lincoln is buried 10 feet down because people were afraid bad people would try to steal his body. Outside there is a huge bust of Lincoln and people rub his nose so much that it is discolored. I can’t imagine why people rub his nose. Is his nose magic? Weird to me. 🤣

We had a wonderful week with our friends. “Camping out” in their driveway made it fun to be nice and close to them. Great visits, games, food, introducing them to Find A Grave (footnote 4), all things Sourdough, and it couldn’t have been any better.

*The blog posts are taken from my daily travel journal. Would you believe – it takes me a 1/2 day every week to whittle down a week’s worth of journal so it won’t be too long for the post each week. HAHA Thank you for reading!

1. Autio is an iPhone app that tells all sorts of history and stories about places all over the country. It is narrated and with my iPhone on accessibility, it shows captions of the words being said. So thankful!

2. “Home” is where we park it. Home is our 2022 Alliance Avenue, 36 ft, 5th wheel.

3. “HOWE” is what we named our Alliance Avenue 36-ft 5th wheel. See: Home On WhEels and we pronounce it Howie. We live and travel in it full-time around the country. HOWE has stayed at least one night in all 48 continuous U.S. states.

4. Find A Grave – https://www.findagrave.com/about