We went on a family vacation last week. We started off staying in Springfield IL for three nights, then we went to St. Louis for three nights and finally stopped in Champaign for one night to visit family.
I have a bunch of photos of Bianca.... These first are from our first stop, Springfield.
First, when we got to the hotel and parked by the side door, the first thing I saw when I got out of the car was:
After we went up to the room, I was coming back down (alone) to get more stuff out of the car, and who should get on the elevator but the officer and his dog! It was a gorgeous sable German Shepherd.
The next day when I was taking Bianca outside another hotel guest asked me if she was the police dog. When I took her out that day I noticed a second, smaller car also with "POLICE K9" notices on it parked in the hotel lot.
The second day, we went to the "Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site" which allows dogs in the outdoor areas.
(with me)
One of the "actors" came up and asked me if Bianca was a good helper dog which confused me for a minute, until finally I realized she thought Bianca was a service dog-- I guess because she was wearing her cooling vest (or because of her Halti?)... I explained that she wasn't a service dog, she was just wearing a vest to keep her cool.
I was walking around the "village" and I noticed that most of the houses had hitching posts out front. Since Bianca was wearing her Halti (looks like a horse halter.) I thought it would be funny to take a photo of her 'hitched' to one of them:
I'm not sure how this photo fits in, but I think it was somewhere we had a picnic lunch in Springfield and Bianca looks cute, so I'm including it.
We also visited the new Lincoln Presidential Museum, which was really nice, one feature was a huge hall with a replica of Lincoln's boyhood home at one side and a replica of the facade of the White House at the other:
When we went to check in at the hotel in St. Louis, I wasn't the one who went to check in and when the person in our group who was came out after checking in they told me there was a dog show going on in the hotel! It was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel show. Apparently they had 100-200 people with dogs staying at the hotel. This would have been a fun and interesting fact except that Bianca has some issues with leash reactivity, so it made the stay rather stressful! There were Cavaliers everywhere, not just in the area where they were doing the show but sitting around in the lobby, sitting outside the front doors, in all the grassy areas most of the time, and of course on the elevators... I used a lot of treats and "leave its" during our stay.
The outdoor "plaza" area around the hotel was really nice.
Lots of flowerbeds:
A fountain:
(I think Bianca's saying "pleeeeze let me jump in?")
And of course the "lake":
We did a lot of planning before our vacation and found a lot of fun things to do, mostly that allowed dogs. We were headed to the AKC Museum of the Dog in Kirkwood and stopped at the downtown Farmer's Market (dog friendly) on the way. Someone had told me about them and also that they had a snowcone stand which sold"Canine Cooler" flavored snow cones for dogs.
Bianca loved it!
Here are a few photos from the AKC Museum of the Dog, which was dog friendly. We also ran into several Cavalier King Charles Spaniels there...
The next day we took a road trip to Alton and Elsah IL. I didn't get a lot of photos of the towns but we did stop at a place called the National Great Rivers Museum.
I walked Bianca over near the museum entrance and they had a really interesting feature outside. It was a replica of a river, complete with a waterfall and signs inviting you to play in it. There were some kids splashing around but they were on their way out, so I took some photos of Bianca and also let her splash around a little. She loved it although she was about as interested in drinking the 'river' as playing in it.
The plaque at the front of the photo shows was the mini river's layout looked like.
After that I walked Bianca by the REAL river- the Mississippi- to try to get her to dry off before we got in the car:
We also stopped at Pere Marquette State Park. They had some nice 'scenic lookout' points such as this:
On the way back past Alton I noticed this odd cave area with a huge cliff painting which apparently (I just looked it up) is called the "Piasa Caves". We didn't have time to stop but I got a few photos as we went past:
There were some other interesting cliffs around there as well:
For dinner we ended up eating at a restaurant in St. Charles, at a sidewalk seating area:
If you're wondering why her Halti is multi-colored, I "customized" it by sewing on colored ribbon in the hopes that people would not keep mistaking it for a muzzle. Here is a better photo of it:
We had planned to go to see the arch on Sunday but that didn't work out, however I insisted we stop there on our way out of town so I could at least get a few photos of it because what's a visit to St. Louis without photos of the arch?
It was a really nice day then too. We really lucked out on the weather as the normal temps there are uppers 80s to low 90s this time of year, but while we were there I think the highest it got was low 80s.
the river near the arch
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