August 30, 2012

Last night was just fine -- no noise and we slept well.  We didn’t unhook last night so it was easy to leave this morning.  We left and drove into Vincennes to visit Grouseland.  This house built was built in 1803 and was the house where William Henry Harrison lived when he was the Indiana Territorial Governor.  It was the first brick house in the Indiana Territory and was the site where Harrison negotiated purchases by the U.S. of huge tracts of land from the Indians.  He then went on to be our 9^th president.  Harrison died of pneumonia less than one month after he was sworn in as President. He was the oldest elected president up until Ronald Reagan. John Tyler assumed the presidency when he died. The very long and informative tour lasted about two hours.  We just wanted to tour the house, not take a history course on William Henry Harrison.  We were the only ones on the tour until half way through and then another man joined us.  This made us leave rather late for the Lincoln site we wanted to see next.  No pictures were allowed in the house. 

After the tour we drove to the Lincoln Boyhood Home National Historical Park in Lincoln City, Indiana.  This is where Abraham Lincoln’s father brought the family when Abe was four years old.  Lincoln’s mother died from milk sickness and is buried here.  A cow eats the white snakeroot plant and it contains tremetol, a poison to animals and humans.  Humans drink the milk from the cow or eat its meat and it causes nausea, and vomiting, and sometimes coma and death.  Lincoln’s father married a family acquaintance a while later, a widow with three children.  She helped instill the love of reading to Lincoln.  The house is not there any more but the national park system has put up a cabin site memorial.

We needed to find a campsite for the weekend that didn’t take reservations because of the holiday weekend.  Jim found a national forest campground that has electricity and we drove there.  We passed the ranger station at 5:15 and they had closed at 5:00.  They came out and helped us anyway.  We drove to Shawnee National Forest, Lake Glendale Recreation Area, Oak Point Campground near the small town of Dixon Springs, Illinois.  We got here at 6:00. They had quite a few sites left and we got one with some land and trees surrounding us to buffer us from the other campers.  It’s also close to the restrooms and showers.  Because of the trees, we don’t get any satellite reception for TV but we do have a lot of shows recorded on the DVR.  It got to 97 degrees today.