Vacationing in the Land of Lincoln

Specifically, Springfield, IL -- and what might you ask is in Springfield? Well as of 2005 the new Presidential Lincoln Library and museum are located in the downtown area near with the Old Capitol Building. Part of the reason for going was for my wife and daughter to do genealogy research at the Lincoln Library (which by the way led to some very fruitful findings).

We also went on several of the typical tours; Lincolns home, Lincolns Tomb, the Old Capitol building and some of the surrounding buildings, such as Union Station (also recent renovated - 2007) and the old Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices .

One non-Lincoln site that we toured (which luckily was re-opened recently as part of the re-opening of Illinois historic sites - no thanks to the ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich) was the Dana-Thomas Home (a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home from circa 1902-04). It's in remarkable condition, again thanks to tax payer money and a previous owner - Charles Thomas/Thomas Publishing who preserved it even while using it as office space for almost 40 years.

I did manage to get some bike riding in by contacting a local club (Springfield Bicycle Club) and rode with some of its members. On one of the routes I even crossed the historic Route 66.

This week will be a "tapering down" training week, with the Horribly Hilly Hundreds coming up this Saturday.

Safe riding all

Life Options and my mission statement

I took an interesting class a few months ago, it was called Life Options, it dealt with self discovery, dreams, and values. One of the things that I found was the my past jobs paralleled my love of cycling, so my mission statement was pretty simple;

Be the Ride Leader, by navigating, mapping or rerouting
around the obstacles in life, while helping others complete the journey.

As responsible ride leaders, we practice this all the time.

Posts have been a little scarce lately, I was on vacation in Disney World last week. I took some advise that I had read about doing things you don't ordinarily do and inversely, not doing things that you normally do, while on vacation. So, no computer and no driving while we were there, of course it helped that we stayed at a Disney resort. We took the buses, boats or monorail everywhere that we went. One of the more interesting things that we did was to take one of the unadvertised behind the scenes tours, specifically, "The Magic Behind the Steam Trains Tour", more on that in a later post.

Have a Happy and Safe 4th of July weekend

Vacation

I was gone for the past week on vacation in central Illinois. My wife did some genealogy where she had some good luck and I got some bike riding in, nothing huge, the longest single day distance was a metric century ride between Galesburg, IL and Blandinsville, IL. This wasn't a supported ride, it just turned out that the route that I picked (staying off major highways) came to a little more than 62 miles. I actually felt much better at the end of this ride than I did at the same distance on the 100 mile ride a few of weeks ago. I even averaged a mile an hour faster on this 62 mile ride than I did on the 100 mile ride, which was pretty good considering I was carrying a change of clothes/shoes and all the food and water that I needed for the trip.