Route 6, The Grand Army of the Republic Highway in Illinois

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Flickr is now limiting the number of photos I can have so these will age out in a year or so.

click photo to enlarge		 Whoa.... there's a storm a coming..... On our long trip home there would end up being a number of days where we would end up driving through the tail end of a storm. We would roll into a town to find out the day before they had severe weather but we were lucky to have just missed it. A summer trip across the great plains of America can be a bit dicey. As I am going through these photos to make web pages I remember all of the great things we experienced and learned. While in Illinois in Ottawa, we learned about the radium girls who were paid by piece work to paint watch dials with luminous paint that was radioactive.  They were told to make their paint brushes pointy using their lips in order to paint more pieces. They were also told this was safe to do. When women would start getting sick the company would go out of business and move to another part of the country and open up shop under a different name. Ottawa is also famous for holding the first Lincoln, Douglas debates.

click photo to enlarge		 In Joliet we stopped at the visitors center, then we went to the historic district to photograph buildings made from local Illinois limestone. Joliet also has the prison made famous in the Blues Brothers movie. A few weeks after we left they were going to start offering tours of the old prison. When we arrived in Moline we went to the John Deere Pavilion. They had a large collection of Deere equipment from small to large and we got a tour and the history of how he started. The man who gave us a tour was a retired teacher and also a dead ringer for John Deere, part of the reason he works there. Next in Moline we went over to the Rock Island Armory and the Army Corps lock 15 on the Mississippi River. We saw a movie on how they control the water level on the river and then we got to see an actual tug and barge go through the lock. The armory had a collection of howitzers that had been developed and built on the island.

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