New Philadelphia, Lincoln’s Home, and Springfield, IL

We got to Garber in Versailles around lunchtime, and were delighted to see the truck parked out front.  We moved back into the camper, and talked to Bruce about what to expect.  He told us that it would shift differently, and that it would also have more black exhaust.  We took it out for a test drive, and Tom found that he preferred the new way it shifted, although we weren’t thrilled with the exhaust.  Bruce said we’d just have to drive it and see if it needed any further tuning, so we took off towards our next stop, Springfield, IL.

However, we decided not to go too far that day, and found the Prairie Home Conservation Area only about an hour from Versailles.  This area has five free designated camping spots, and part of our decision to stop a little early was that it was the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, and we didn’t want to get there and find that all the spots were full.  We needn’t have worried; the first one we came to was occupied, but the second was empty, and after we parked and went for a walk, we found that the third was also empty.  We were a little surprised because it was a beautiful weekend, and the area is beautiful, and we took a couple of nice walks on the forest roads that evening and the next morning before heading for Illinois.

After our walk, we headed towards Springfield with plans to stop at the New Philadelphia Historic Site on our way.  This was a brief stop, because while the concept of the park was interesting, there wasn’t much to see.  New Philadelphia was the first town in the country incorporated by a freed Black slave, and became something of a model community because all different types of people settled there and worked together.  However, nothing remains of the community or the buildings, so the park consists of a kiosk with informational signage, and a field with signposts indicating where different buildings and significant sites used to stand.  After our recent experiences with ticks, we decided it wasn’t worth walking through the grass to imagine a long gone town.

We knew we wouldn’t make it to Springfield, so we found Waverly Lake City Park between New Philadelphia and Springfield.  This was another free park with campsites around a small lake associated with the city of Waverly.  We walked around the park and enjoyed a magnificent sunset.  We had been worried about where we would find places to camp, both because we knew BLM land is pretty much non-existent outside of the West, and because it was Memorial Day Weekend and we figured everybody would want to take advantage of the great weather and camp.  But, between state, county, and city parks, we were finding that there was plenty of room at the free and inexpensive campgrounds.

Waverly Lake wasn’t too far outside of Springfield, which was a two-for-one stop for us since we were going to see both the Lincoln’s Home National Historic Site and the State Capitol.  The Lincoln’s Home National Historic Site had free RV parking, so we used that as our base and started with a tour of the site.  The park is the neighborhood where Lincoln and his family lived when he was elected as President, and the Park Service has purchased all of the buildings in an approximately 4 block area and renovated - or in some cases moved - all of the buildings so the neighborhood looks like it did when the Lincolns lived there.  Some of the houses are museums, and some are park administration buildings, but they took the Lincoln house and made it as much like it was when the Lincolns lived there as possible.  Tourists can only go in with a guided tour, and Tom and I were initially a little disappointed when we got there because signs saying all tours for the day were full were posted on the doors, but when we went inside to talk to a ranger, she told us that they had two back to back tours with one space left in each tour, and if we were willing to split up, we could have those spots.  We of course took the spots, and I walked around the neighborhood and looked in the museums while Tom toured the house, and then he poked around while I went on the house tour.  We really enjoyed it both because of the historical value of the site, and also because we love looking at old houses, having previously owned two that were the same generation as the Lincoln house.  

The Lincoln Home is only a few blocks from the capitol, so we left the truck parked in the park lot and walked to see the capitol.  We were disappointed to find yet another capitol building under construction, this time for an underground parking lot.  The complex isn’t surrounded by parkland like some of the capitals we’ve visited, but with the Lincoln site just a few blocks away, it doesn’t really matter.  We were a little puzzled by a couple of blocks that look like your average abandoned lot in front of the governor’s house, but when we walked around to the other side of the lot we found that it’s in the process of being developed into parkland, so it made a little more sense.  We walked back to the park, ready to continue on towards Chicago.

We couldn’t find any city or county parks within a reasonable distance of Springfield on the path to Chicago, but we did find Weldon Springs State Park.  We pulled in and talked to the camp hosts, who gave us the last non-electric site in the campground on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.  The campground is set at the edge of a lake which is at the center of the park, and in the morning we took a great walk all the way round the lake.  The trail is pretty well traveled, so it was virtually tick free, and we really enjoyed having a nice place to walk and exercise the dogs before heading for Chicago.