Our Own Lincoln Pilgrimage

Yesterday was such a FUN day!!! Yesterday made all of the seven-hour meetings, the days spent building the train car, and all the hours spent listening to Mr. Riccio talk about light bulbs worth it. The exhibit opening was awesome, and everything went even better than we had all hoped.

One of my very favorite BYU professors, Dr. Susan Rugh, got to Mattoon on Friday night, and then she met up with me here in Charleston yesterday morning. I took her on a tour of town and campus, and then she wanted to eat lunch at Jimmy John's. We decided that Provo needs a Jimmy John's. There is one in St. George, but I think the BYU kids would like it in Provo. Then I took Dr. Rugh to the Tarble Arts Center, and she did a wonderful job giving a presentation about travel and tourism to kick off the exhibit opening. She talked about heritage tourism and pilgrimages to historic sites, focusing mainly on Lincoln sites. It was so great! Everyone loved it!! Her presentation was very interesting, and she brought just the right amount of humor into it. She was also very courteous even though some people asked some weird questions. She totally rocks!

Dr. Rugh liked seeing the exhibit too. Here we are sitting in the "economy class" train car. Dr. Rugh was quite impressed that we built the train car ourselves :-)


Greg and his mom were nice enough to come all the way from Athens, where they had taken a load of things from the house in Sullivan, to see the exhibit! That made it extra special to have them there. A lot of my classmates had their families there, so we had a pretty good crowd.

After the exhibit opening, Dr. Rugh, Greg, Pam, and I decided to take our own Lincoln pilgrimage, like Dr. Rugh had talked about, to visit Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln's grave and the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site.

Here we are at the grave at Shiloh Cemetery. Dr. Rugh thought it was especially pretty out there in the cornfields.



Then, we went to the Lincoln Log Cabin. Dr. Rugh thought it was really funny that people make a big deal about the Lincoln Log Cabin as an Abraham Lincoln site--even though Abraham Lincoln never lived there :-) As I've said before, if there's even a remote possibility that Abraham Lincoln may have slept someplace or drawn water from a particular well, they put it on the "Looking for Lincoln" tourism list :-) Greg and I posed for a cute picture at the cabin. Speaking of cute pictures, I saw some pictures of Greg when he was a baby, and he was adorable!!!! And that hasn't changed!

Then, the highlight of the pilgrimage was a visit to the world's tallest Abraham Lincoln statue. Dr. Rugh loves crazy roadside attractions, so she thought that Lincoln Springs Resort ("Honest Fun for Everyone") was just great. I learned something really funny about the statue--back in the 1980s it got hit by lightning which fried Abe's finger off and turned the whole statue black! He looks pretty spiffy these days though, with his fresh paint job. I can see how he would get hit by lightning though, because he is a lot taller than anything around him.

He really is very tall! After a visit to the statue, we went to dinner with the whole Historical Administration crowd at AJ's. It was a pretty funny dinner because Kristen had all of these slide shows that we had to watch before we ate, so we were all getting pretty hungry. The only table that had enough seats for us to all sit together was the table where Alisha and her parents and her boyfriend Matt were sitting. It was so funny! Much to Alisha's chagrin, her parents proceeded to tell Dr. Rugh that they were both BYU graduates, and they started talking about a bunch of church stuff. Matt was totally oblivious to what was going on and was asking for clarification on a number of things like "What is LDS?"--he obviously doesn't know anything about the person that Alisha was before she met him. The look of sheer horror on Alisha's face as the dinner conversation developed around the Church was priceless. It was great. :-)

The only sad part of the day was when it ended. I was sad to say goodbye to Dr. Rugh. She was going to head out early this morning to make it up to Chicago to fly home today, so we had to say our goodbyes last night. She is such a great person! I am looking forward to this summer when she and I will get to work together on an article about tourism at LDS historic sites. After dinner, Greg, his mom, and I went and got ice cream at Dairy Queen, which was super fun, but again, I was sad to say goodbye. There had been so much work and anticipation leading up to yesterday, so it was kind of like the post-Christmas let-down when the day came to a close, but I had so much fun with everyone, and I will always remember yesterday as a great day.

I am totally pooped today though, and I have a lot of homework and catching up to do before tomorrow. Even so, today is also a great day because it was six months ago today that Greg and I went on our first date!!! I am really glad that he called me and we went out that day! As soon as he asked me if I wanted to go to the Museum of Funeral Customs, I knew I'd found a keeper :-) I love you Greg, and I am so very excited that in less than six months from now, we'll be married!