Tom has been planning a “Mystery Vacation” for us since March 2022. One night we were sitting in the hot tub and we started talking about when we should go on a trip to New England. I looked at our shared Google calendar and saw that a “Mystery Vacation” was on the calendar for 15-19 September. Of course he wanted me to look at the calendar to find that entry. I started playing 20 questions but he wouldn’t give up any info. About a month or so later we were planning our leave days for the fiscal year and as Tom was talking out loud he said he needed 5 days for Clickcon, 7 days for fishing, and 4 days for Tennessee. I said, “What’s Tennessee? Oh is that our mystery vacation?” He let out an expletive which would indicate he messed up. I didn’t Google anything happening in Tennessee with those dates because I was looking forward to a surprise. Fast forward to this week and Tom sent me the address for our stay so I could input it on my leave form and found that we were headed to Memphis.
Thursday morning his plan was for us to get out the door at 9:00, but unfortunately work got in the way for both us and we didn’t head out until 11:00. As we were driving through Illinois I remembered that there was a place we could go to get the free military America the Beautiful national park pass. Since we are heading to Acadia National Park in October I thought it would be good if we could pick it up in advance. I Googled and found that the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie could be on the way depending on where we were going. Tom then revealed that our first stop was going to be the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL. Perfect!! Midewin was only 7 minutes off the road we were travelling on. So our first stop was actually Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie office where we got our pass. We asked if there was anything we could see fast and we were told that we might be able to see a herd of buffalo from the road a couple of miles up the road. We went that way for a little but not seeing any buffalo we quickly turned the car around and got back on the road towards Springfield.
We got to the Lincoln Museum at 3:15 which didn’t give us a lot of time to go through the museum since they close at 5:00, but we were able to watch both movies and get through both exhibits. We did rush through the pre-president years exhibit as we only had 10 minutes for it. Even though our time was limited I still really enjoyed what we saw and thought they did a really good job displaying the history in a fun and informative way. Tom was originally planning that we would next go to the Arch in St. Louis, but since it’s after Labor Day they are now in their winter hours and close at 5:00 so we wouldn’t be able to go up in it. We decided to skip it in the hopes that maybe we could stop there on the way back home.
Leaving Springfield the GPS showed that it was almost 4 hours to the Bed and Breakfast that Tom had reservations at in Paducah, KY so we just decided to press and get going to Paducah. The GPS offered a “better” alternate route that we accepted. After a while we began to wonder if this was the better route as we were on a single lane highway going through small town after small town. We stopped for dinner at Hawg Diner in Vandalia, IL. I had a Hawg Wing (which was a BBQ pork shank) with macaroni and cheese and baked beans and Tom had a ribeye steak salad. Both were good and reasonably priced. Our meal was only $19 which was way cheaper than our lunch at Tropical Smoothie Cafe for $27!
We got to our B&B at 9:50p.m. We stayed at The Respite Bed & Breakfast (therespitebnb.com) and basically just got into our room and crashed. I’m looking forward to what else the weekend has in store. I know many more surprises to come!!
