More Cemetery Exploring

We continued our quest to find nice places to enjoy the outdoors that were far away from other people. Our visit to Bellefontaine Cemetery was a win, with lots of space and close to zero people. We continued our cemetery theme with a visit to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.

 

This was a military cemetery after all. Even in death, there were a lot of rules to follow.

Notable residents include two Medal of Honor recipients as well as 123 victims of the Palawan massacre. As the Allies advanced in the Japanese-occupied Philippines, Japanese herded American POWs into buildings and then set the buildings on fire in order to stop them from being rescued.

You know what, I think this is meant to be an insult, but I'm gonna allow it.

A Delicious Encounter with Pickled Watermelon Rind

My mom likes fried chicken a lot. So in 2012 I took my dear mother on a road trip to the World Fried Chicken Festival in London, Kentucky. We also visited the original KFC which was like a roadside restaurant and motel. Anyhoo, on the way back we visited the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill. We ate there and one of the sides was pickled watermelon rind. I thought it was wild because it was a thing I had not previously considered to be edible. It's kind of fun to turn a thing that isn't food into food through the magic of pickling. Well that meal must have left quite an impression on me because I've wanted to pickle watermelon rind myself ever since. The apocalyptic coronavirus landscape that we now live in seems like the perfect opportunity to pickle items that I may have to eat out of the trash. You know, when our monetary system collapses and roving bands of warriors battle over the remaining gasoline.

We take a lot of walks down deserted city streets these days.

The internet is a magical place full of weirdos so it wasn't difficult at all to find a pickled watermelon rind recipe.

Peeling the husk of a melon is a lot more work than I realized I was signing up for. Greatness doesn't come easy, I suppose.

The recipe called for jalepeños which I was excited about. 

Long story short, you cube the rind, add in vinegar, spices, and about ten pounds of sugar, heat it up, cool it down, badda bing badda boom you got pickles.

Lincoln's Hood

We popped up to Springfield, Illinois to visit my parents today.

We ate lunch together outside at a respectable distance from them, and brought our own food to limit the opportunities for cootie transfer.

Afterward we decided to take a stroll around the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.

Some interesting signs in the vicinity:

"While visiting the Lincoln home and the surrounding historical neighborhood, you will encounter conditions that were part of everyday life in the nineteenth century. Uneven and slippery boardwalks, walking surfaces with loose stones, and narrow staircases are part of the historic scene."

"A Sea of Mud

'When it rained, the earthen streets became a morass of shoe-clinging mud. During the dry weather, these same streets quickly converted to avenues of eye-burning, house-filling dust.' - Thomas Dyba and George L. Painter, Seventeen Years at Eighth and Jackson

The streets of Springfield started as messy, 55-foot-wide expanses of dirt and small stones. 10-inch wide oak planks served as curbing to protect yards and wooden walkways from erosion. Once a year, the streets were graded by teams of horses to control the dangerous ruts caused by weather and traffic.

The city added storm culverts and gutters in 1853, to control overflows of mud and rainwater. The gutters were stabilized with curbing in the late 1850's; plank crosswalks were also added at the time, allowing for safer and cleaner travel by pedestrians.

The construction of Springfield's streets didn't change until the 1880's, when the city paved the roads with blocks of hewn cedar."

"Harriet Dean House

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln purchased two lots in this block for $300. Twelve years later, he sold a half lot to Harriet Dean for $125.00. Mrs. Dean purchased an adjacent lot from someone else and had a house built, thus becoming a neighbor of the Lincolns."

I drove around my old stomping grounds and pointed out some landmarks of my childhood. The Pattons lived a few blocks away and I used to hang out at their house a lot.

The highway the leads to my parents' house passes by the local little amusement/water park. It's always nostalgic to pass by Knight's action park.

They happen to have a drive-in movie theatre! I don't think it's retro like the others we've visited... I seem to recall this one being built during my lifetime.

I think Trolls is the of the few new movies that studios have released in recent months. Since conventional theatres are all either closed or empty, they have been sitting on all of their new releases and waiting. It's then a bit of a vicious cycle for the businesses because they can't open with no new material to show. Anyway as a result I've seen this Trolls movie showing at numerous outdoor theatres.

As I said there are no new movies these days so it was exciting to have a chance to see another new release: The Invisible Man. It was a modern take on the classic story where the bad guy is made invisible by some technological suit that he invented. I liked it and I like the main actress from her Mad Men days.

Many hotels are closed so they light up their rooms to make cutesie shapes these days.