Jack’s Wednesday guest post –

We continue to stumble across delightful jewels on each day of this road-trip. Today we re-visited Galesburg on our meandering way back home from Wyoming and South Dakota. This was the place where we stayed on the way out and where we visited Carl Sandburg’s birthplace.

This time we stayed in the same rather seedy downtown hotel and it was even seedier –cue dead cockroach in the bath. We vowed never to return!

However, Wendy had done some research and had discovered that there was a bakery nearby that opened early for breakfast (the seedy hotel didn’t offer breakfast at all). To our delight and surprise it was situated in a really lovely historic downtown and was attached to a wonderful grocery and health-food store.

Not only that but we were greeted by a couple of lovely old local geezers who were obviously regular members of the ‘breakfast club’ and were un-threateningly curious about us and where we had come from.

For a small main street store it had an amazing inventory of goods and when I say ‘goods’ I also mean very high quality. And the prices were equally amazing! We spent a happy hour and about a hundred bucks there before tearing off down the road to Cincinnati, our final stop. Wendy wanted to see the famous book fountain in front of the public library.

It’s much smaller in person, but we also ate Lebanese food (which is hard to come by in Southwest Virginia) and indulged in the hotels’ elegant outdoor pool.

In actual fact, everywhere we’ve stayed (including the tent) has been absolutely fine, with that one exception. We are determined to repeat this adventure, with friends next time, and we’ll have no hesitation in including Galesburg in the itinerary again – just a different hotel!