Not the most comfortable of nights with not a great deal of sleep and full of aches it got to about 4:30am and we figured we'd give up and go and find some breakfast and wait for the sun to come up. A couple of minutes away we found . It didn't open until 5am so we kicked about in the attached shop until 5am came round.
Jane had a big-arse pile of pancakes and maple syrup and I went for eggs, toast and a sausage (single). The cafe was every bit as quiet as you'd imagine for the time of morning. Just us and a couple of truckers. One started chatting about he use to drive around 1,000 miles a day but he's cut back recently. As we left he gave us complex instructions on how to get to where we were going next, though we had a GPS but didn't find a good point in the conversation to tell me. A toot of the horn, a wave to the trucker and we disappeared off towards Funk's Grove as the daylight slowly started to appear.
When you see somewhere called Funk's Grove you head for it. So we did.
Funk's Grove, Illinois, 18 September 2016
Shrouded in the early mist of 6am or so we explored the abandoned town, then drove towards the church and walked around the graveyard. There were a lot of graves, but pooled from a smallish set of surnames. Many graves simply had a surname. No first names, or even dates.
Off to Atlanta to find the second of three Big Men, the Muffler Man with the Hot Dog. Surprisingly easy to find we snapped it and walked around the town on a quiet Sunday morning. Pleasingly there was a launderette crossed with a second-hand book/record shop. We weren't entirely sure who it was aimed at.
A little way up the road was a museum about Abraham Lincoln. Closed, obviously.
A stop in the pretty town of Elkhart, then on to Springfield (not that one, another one) to find Lincoln's house. He only owned one house and this was it.
Presidential Houses are all fine but we had the third Big Man to find, and in Springfield we found him. The Lauterbach Muffler Man! Three for three.
Finally, finally... off to a hotel with a BED. So nice to finally have one after (forty hours?) without.