Time with the Family

Day 6 - November 5, 2015 (Great Lakes Region Trip)

Happy birthday to Dean! To mark his special day, we were awaken by Reveille at sunrise. It played about every 15 or 20 minutes for quite awhile. Now, we knew Taps wasn't in the tv show the night before.  We got dressed and left the hotel. 

Leigh had told us there was a Starbucks on base. We started there and picked up a drink for her. Dean and Robin had not seen Curtis (8th grade) or Andie (6th grade) since they were very little and had never met Erin (4th grade). We were greeted by all the kids. Since their family had taken a trip to many of the places we had visited on our trip out west, the kids wanted to share their stories and pictures with us. We had fun comparing stories.

Before long, Andie and Erin had online Latin classes online. Andie's class was first and when she finished, it was Erin's turn. Curtis had gotten his schoolwork completed during the week so he could visit. Robin really enjoyed listening to how the online class worked. When we asked Leigh why she chose Latin for the girls, she said it is a parent's job to make the kids suffer and this was one way she could! Down deep, she knew Latin would help them with root words and grammar. We enjoyed visiting with Leigh and Curtis. 

Once the girls finished their work, we left for an afternoon of history. Leigh drove us to Hodgenville, KY so we could visit Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace National Historic Park 

First we went to the Visitor Center, watched the film, and looked at the exhibits. We loved the format that was used to display the family tree. The family Bible was huge and interesting. The displays of how the family lived and the tools they used provided some visual insight of the time period.

As we walked out of the Visitor Center, we saw the large bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln's family. His mother (Nancy) was holding Abraham while his father (Thomas) was standing behind Abraham's older sister (Sarah). Later, Abraham would have a brother (Thomas, Jr.) who would die in infancy.


Outside, the kids went directly for the tall flight of steps, leading to the birthplace home. There are 56 steps representing the 56 years Lincoln lived. Curtis, Andie, and Erin counted every one of them, just to make sure. They ran up and down several times while the older folks barely made it up the first time.

The Symbolic Log Cabin was massive upon entry into the building, which was built around it. We walked around while observing the way the logs were put together. The fireplace area was very unique in that the height of the logs decreased in size the further up they stacked.

We walked outside and the kids ran down the hills on the side. They decided the grass on each side of the steps would be an awesome sledding hill. At the bottom, we saw the Sinking Spring. This spring was the source of the family's fresh water. Abraham Lincoln's father bought the land and named it Sinking Springs Farm. One of Abraham's chores was to draw water for the family from this spring.

Close by Sinking Spring was another building with 4 small cabins on one side. This was Nancy Lincoln's Inn, built in 1928. It was privately owned and operated as lodging for visitors until after World War II. Now, it is a museum and souvenir shop. 

The kids took another run up the stairs and down the hills before we got in the car to leave. We were unable to visit the Boyhood Home replica at Knob Creek because we weren't there on a day it was open to visitors.

We left and headed into the town of Hodgenville. On the town circle, we found the Lincoln Museum. We entered the museum gift store and bought our tickets. When we walked into the actual museum and found ourselves in a large 2 story room. On the first floor, were little recreated scenes of important parts of Abrahm Lincoln's life, created using wax figures. Next to each scene was a description and some "Did you know..." questions, aimed to make you think or wonder why.

Here are a few of the "Did You Know..." questions?

• Did you know that Abe was 9 years old when his mother died?
• Did you know that Abe's older sister, Sarah, married and then died in childbirth at age 21?
• Did you know that Abe is the only President to have held a patent? It was for a device to lift boats over shoals, but it was never manufactured.
• Did you know that Lincoln was engaged to Mary S. Owens 1837-1838, but broke off the engagement when Abe got "cold feet"? He married Mary Ann Todd in 1842.
• Did you know that Stephen Douglas courted Mary Todd?
• Did you know that Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address was the shortest ever given?
• Did you know Robert E. Lee was asked by Lincoln in February 1861 to command the Union Army and he refused? He was later asked in May 1861 by Confederate President Jefferson Davis to command the southern forces and he accepted. 
• Did you know that Robert Todd Lincoln was present at the Surrender (Appomattox), but his father was not?
• Did you know that John Wilkes Booth's original plan was to kidnap the President, carry him to Richmond, VA, and use him in exchange for Confederate prisoners of war?

An item on display was a section of a branch from the boundary tree at Sinking Spring Farm. In an 1837 survey, the tree was identified as a boundary marker. At its death in 1976, the tree was 195 years old, had reached 6 feet in diameter, and 90 feet in height. The crown spread was 115 feet. We had seen a much larger section of this boundary tree in the Visitor Center at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park.

 There were also other items displayed which related to Lincoln's life and presidency. 

We drove home with new knowledge. Leigh fixed dinner while we waited for Andrew to get home. Dinner was delicious. We sat around and visited for the rest of the evening. The kids had fun telling Andrew what we had done. Leigh and Robin pulled out their trip albums and we again shared more comparisons of our trips. Robin and Dean had shared some of the Andrew Johnson information they had learned and we watched the dvd we had purchased. They all had such a good laugh at us thinking Taps was part of the tv show. We quickly learned that bugle calls go off in the early morning, at lunch, for retreat around 5:00, and then Taps at night. Army life...the kids are used to the bugle calls and hardly hear them anymore. We had so much fun! 

Andrew told us to be very careful as we drove back to the hotel because they have deer all over their neighborhood. Boy, he wasn't kidding! We saw 5 deer laying in the grass within their neighborhood. As we pulled into the drive leading to the hotel, we saw 4 more deer, including a baby. We didn't get any good pictures because Robin was just too excited seeing the deers.

Once we got in the room, we figured out what we were going to do the next day. Curtis attends a co-op school on Fridays. The girls have enrichment classes while Curtis in in school. Leigh had to teach one of the enrichment classes so they would be gone all day until late afternoon. We decided we would drive to Cincinnati and go to the William Howard Taft National Historic Site. It was about a 2 hour drive, but we had all day. We would see them for dinner.

Taps had happened while we were still at Leigh and Andrew's so we knew it was late. We might have missed Taps, but our day is done. We went to bed knowing we had a plan. That made it easier to drift off to sleep.