Misinformation

    For the Holiday season, I like to peruse different papers and websites to find different activities/events that we may enjoy. Some of the events we plan ahead of time and tickets are bought, and others are 'spur of the moment' ones.
    Dec.24 was cold, but since it was a beautiful sunny day, it seemed a shame to spend it all indoors. I had read that from Dec19-Jan.2 the Lincoln Home National Historic Site had a decorated neighborhood to walk through that was free and no ticket needed. I was interested to see if they kept to 'olde time decorating' or a modern style. So, spur of the moment, we decided to check it out. When we got there we put 2 hours worth of money into the parking meter. We walked to the edge of the neighborhood and did not see any decorations, so we went inside the visitor center.

    I asked the 'visitor services' for directions to the decorated neighborhood and she looked at me like I had 'lobsters coming out of my ears'!! I was informed that the only Holiday decorating they did was inside Lincoln's Home :-( We could have taken a tour of it, but we had our hearts set on being outdoors. We decided to walk thru the neighborhood anyway. The houses did have wreaths on the doors, so whoever wrote the 'Holiday Happenings' blurb, must have thought that constituted as a neighborhood holiday decoration display.

    The others read some of the display signs, as I took a few pictures. With the trees bare, it was nice to be able to get better views of the houses.

   When we finished walking thru the neighborhood, we figured there was probably more than an hour on the parking meter. So, off to the capitol we go :-) Walking along this street, I start noticing...

   some pretty interesting signs. After taking a picture of this one, I got a bit behind...

   and had to speedwalk to catch up with the others and decided not to take any more pictures (or look at) of the signs.

 We decided there was not enough time to go inside the capitol and walked around the area in front of it instead.

As we walked back to the car, we agreed that we enjoyed our outing very much, despite the misinformation.

One of many beautiful churches in the downtown area.

Now, I am looking forward to revisiting the National Historic Site and exploring downtown Springfield in the future at my own pace...which means lots of picture taking :-)