A man and his horse: the skeletons! Purchased in 1919 for non-Halloween purposes.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together on some new experience. On past trips we’d visited the graves, tombs, mausoleums and virtual posthumous palaces of 24 American Presidents in varying accommodations and budgets. One of the biggest names ever to grace the White House kept eluding us: Abraham Lincoln, planted a mere three hours away in Springfield, Illinois. In May 2023 I figured: let’s make his tomb a trip headliner of its very own, not a warm-up act on the road to Branson or whatever. History is technically more Anne’s fervent interest than mine, but we found plenty to do beyond reading wordy educational placards…

…though sometimes placard-based education can be interesting. The Illinois State Museum is smaller than our Indiana State Museum, but lured us to their doorstep with a temporary exhibit of Stuff Generation X Kids Had (including us!). We made the most of our admission fees and browsed other rooms while we were there.

An issue of Jet featuring Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, the first African-American to serve in the office.

A History of Gun Ownership in Illinois, and maybe not just Chicago.

Longtime MCC readers know Anne collects smashed pennies and weeps every time we encounter an out-of-order smashed penny machine. Those happen much too often.

We’ve seen plenty of Natural History exhibits at other museums, but they’re always the most fun to photograph. Behold: airborne waterborne animals!

Shark Attack: the Educational Video Game!

Fun trivia: Illinois was deeply underwater waaaay back when. To this day no Precambrian fossils have ever been discovered there, which complicates the obligatory “natural history” section a bit.

But Illinois kids ought to see animal bones in a museum like any other kids, so they’ve acquired a few anyway.

Hey, kids! Taxidermy! Enjoy such critters as a mountain lion…

…a cute, fuzzy, kleptomaniac raccoon…

…and Canadian geese, which Illinois apparently loves way more than we do.

…and then we got back to our scheduled programming, by which I mean more Lincoln attractions.

To be continued! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: The Tomb of Honest Abe
Part 2: More Wars, More Memorials
Part 3: The Illinois State Capitol
Part 4: Around the Capitol Complex
Part 5: Generation X Belongs in a Museum
Part 7: His Presidential Library & Museum
Part 8: The Lincoln Museum Minus Lincoln
Part 9: ‘Round Springfield
Part 10: Lincoln Home & Law & Gifts