Good Family Trips
I make suggestions and publish several related links in my notes, so that in trying to plan a family trip you can find places or activities to interest everyone. I hope to allow you to plan an affordable and pleasurable trip for your family. Our family has found sometimes it works well, not to drag everyone to every excursion on a family vacation. So as I write about battlefield trips of the American Civil War, I have some advice don't make your wife or four year old walk every acre of Gettysburg. Erik, Alex, and I would walk every preserved battlefield of the Civil War. Nancy would rather not walk every one. Nancy is happy on a trip to find a relaxing place to read a book, preferably at a beach, while my sons and I go looking at the fields we have read about in history books. Sometimes playing in a park or swimming pool can be the best part of a trip for small children. If you can allow kids time just to be themselves, it will make your time trip a great experience for everyone.
I am writing about trips to Lincoln sites, I intended to do this last June, a tornado delayed the effort. I did get to sing patriotic songs at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum. I love being able to have performed the Battle Hymn of the Republic in this memorial to our great Civil War president. In 1856 Walt Whitman wrote: "I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate." Lincoln fitted the description although didn't grow the beard until after the election.
Fall Color Trip - Northeast Iowa and Southwest Wisconsin
Civil War Parks - Gettysburg/Antietam & Shiloh/Vicksburg
Illinois' Native America Past - Cahokia Mounds
Spring Mill Indiana - Mitchell Indiana
Nauvoo IL an easy drive from Elmwood
Illinois' Native America Past - Dickson Mounds
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