Springfield Illinois
Trip Dates
May 1 - May 3rd 2019
How I Got There
I was in Chicago for business, and I took the Amtrak from Chicago to Springfield. The train ride was similar to the one I took a few years ago from Indianapolis to Chicago, except we got off to a bumpy start and it took nearly two hours to get out of Chicago proper.
Where I Stayed
There is no Marriott in Springfield. I ended up staying in the tallest building in the city at the Wyndham. The hotel was a bit dated, but there was an excellent restaurant on the roof with panoramic views of the city.
How I Got Around
Downtown Springfield is pretty walkable, so I walked. I took a bus here and there, and also took an occasional Uber.
What I Did
After a bumpy start out of Chicago I arrived in the afternoon and was able to check in early to the hotel. After dropping my things off, I explored downtown. I visited the old statehouse, Lincoln museum and presidential library, and Union Station. Afterwards, I got dinner at Nick and Nino's steakhouse at the top of the hotel and it was excellent, especially compared to my microwaved cheeseburger on Amtrak earlier that day.
The next day I explored Lincoln's old neighborhood, which has been preserved as a National Park. I walked down to the State Capitol and after touring the interior, visited the Illinois history museum.
On my last day, I didn't do anything too notable. I checked off a few more Lincoln themed spots such as the old railroad station that he left from when he became president. I spent the afternoon working from the Library and then made my way to Springfield airport for my flight back to San Francisco.
What Was The Fuss
Two words – Abraham Lincoln.

I've learned throughout my travels so far that every state in the Union claims Abraham Lincoln as their own. Springfield takes this to a whole new level. Their entire economy is essentially "Lincoln lived here for a while".
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Future Fonts from Blog – Brad Frost
- 21st Century C++ from Communications of the ACM
- Submarines DevCon 2025 Keynote Speech from JoshHaines.com
- How I Use AI: Meet My Promptly Hired Model Intern from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- DeepSeek from Maggie Appleton
- Digital Reality Digital Shock from Christopher Butler
- 10 habits to help becoming a Debian Maintainer from Optimized by Otto
- Tiny corners from Manuel Moreale RSS Feed
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
MusicBrainz Picard identifies songs from *.mp3 files and automatically fixes metadata
In my first attempt to switch from streaming to move back to listening to *.mp3 files, one of the issues I encountered was organization: how to standardize the metadata of the songs? The solution I was familiar with at the time — manually editing each son…
via Manual do Usuário April 24, 2025Google's control of the web could be coming to an end
It's been hard to avoid the US government's antitrust case against Meta lately, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent three days in front of the cameras in Congress, testifying about his company's alleged anti-competitive tactics. But another equall…
via The Torment Nexus April 24, 2025$5 million in tokens stolen from ZKsync
An attacker compromised an admin account belonging to the ZKsync Ethereum layer-2 project, which is built by Matter Labs. By doing so, they were able to steal approximately $5 million worth of the ZK token, which the project said wer…
via Web3 is Going Just Great April 24, 2025Generated by openring