Day 5, 23Mar2024- Lincoln's Boyhood home and the Arch

It was a quiet night at Country Boy Brewing and we slept in a bit. 

 We left about 08:30AM and headed west.  

On a whim, we detoured off the highway to visit President Lincoln's boyhood home in southern Indiana. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and is known as being the US House Representative from Illinois, but he grew up in Indiana from age 7 to 21. Two years after moving to Indiana his mother died of milk sickness, which is caused by consuming milk from a cow that had eaten the snakeroot plant. His sister later died during child birth (1828), it seems he had his share of family tragedy. 

Lincoln's childhood home is now a national memorial. We were the only visitors in the museum but the nice park ranger ran the movie for us anyway.  

Once you tour the museum there is a 1 mile loop trail that leads to the location of his family cabin and 12 stones that recount parts of his life. It was a nice day and we needed to stretch our legs. 

This is a bronze marker in the likeness of what was left of his cabin.

Today there is a replica of the Lincoln homestead.  

It was a nice walk on a sunny day and we had the park to ourselves for lunch in the LTV. 

We moved west to St. Louis arriving around 16:00. We parked along the Mississippi River on a pretty good slope, but it was an easy walk to the Arch. 

The arch is surrounded by a beautiful park with lots of green and a huge staircase that leads to the river, it really is very nicely done. 

Underground there is a large museum and access to the tram ride to the top of the arch. We would have liked to take the tram but it was sold out for the day. The museum was interesting but it seemed quite disconnected to me, maybe if we spent more time it would make more sense. It is still worth the stop, the arch is an engineering marvel. 

St. Louis was truly the gateway to the west. 

We left St Louis and looked for a place to park for the night. We made a last minute request to stay at the Paddle Stop Brewery just west of St. Louis in New Haven, Missouri, it was immediately accepted. 

The HH website said they were open until 9PM but when we arrived at 6:30PM they were closed, they have shortened winter hours. No worries, the owner was waiting for us, he even poured me a beer and chatted with us for a bit. We were his first customers from Vermont, so we got to put our name on his map of the country on the wall, I forgot to take a picture of that. I have found that Harvest Hosts are some of the nicest people you could meet. 

He even told us to pull our van up onto the cement pad along his buildings to block the noise of the passing trains.

A few trains did go by but we didn't mind. 

Sunday we will continue to trek West, our next stop is TBD.