Lincoln and the Roadside Reunion
Tuesday started with a 9:00 departure from Charlie’s guest house in Sonora. The day was going to be a busy one as I wanted to stop by the Abraham Lincoln birthplace site and my brother Kevin was driving down from Indiana to meet me for lunch. I suppose describing this day as a “busy” one is relative to some of the other days of the trip.
After riding on low traffic rural roads through the morning I was looking at my map for the location of the Lincoln site. It wasn’t marked well and none of the roads I was on had a sign pointing the way. Phone service is so spotty in this area but I was able to get on google maps, only to see that I had to take another road and loop back in the direction I came from. This ended up adding another eight miles to the day.
A big attraction at the birthplace site is the Lincoln cabin. However, they do a very good job of hiding it. Since I was in a bit of a hurry, after watching part of a movie about Lincoln and the site at the visitor’s center I went outside to find the cabin. There was a memorial building and also a sign pointing towards a path stating “Lincoln Cabin.”
I walked the path for a while, then ran into some guy and asked him where the cabin was. He said he was looking for it too. It turned out that the lost cabin was actually inside the memorial building, and as you walked in it seemed a little out of place. The employee there told me about how a somewhat shady entrepreneur long ago was taking the cabin on tour around the country claiming it to be Lincoln’s birth home. The only issue was that it’s wasn’t. But apparently it’s good enough to house under the memorial building. In any case, it was neat to at least be on the grounds where he was born.
Leaving the site and moving further up the road, I talked with my brother Kevin who was driving all the way down from Indianapolis. We agreed to meet in the town of New Haven, about ten miles up the road from me. Along the way there was another Lincoln site, this one where he moved to a few years after being born. I didn’t have much time here, but perhaps the same con man supplied this site with cabins as well.
But again, cabins aside, it was interesting to see the land that Lincoln’s parents owned in the early 1800s (photo below).
When I arrived at the town of New Haven, population listed as 800, I couldn’t find Kevin and the phone service wasn’t working. That’s where libraries come in handy as you can get on the internet and use skype.
There’s not much to pick from as far as places to eat in New Haven, so it was at the Five Star convenience store and gas station, where we sat and had lunch and talked about the trip. The one table they have outside for customers is very much sought after– by employees who are just dying to get outside and have a smoke. As a customer, you certainly hate to inconvenience the employees at the convenience store.
But it was a great visit with Kevin and then it was back on the road for a remaining, relatively easy 25 miles into Springfield.